Need
by ArieSemir
Summary: This is a birthday present fic. Beka and Dylan are almost disgustingly happy with each other in the early stages of their romance. But when Beka's past rears its ugly head, will they lose each other for good? Beka/Dylan, drugs, angst, torture, swearing!
1. Chapter 1

This fic is dedicated to the most dedicated lover of Andromeda fanfiction I know, Mary Rose.

**Chapter One**

"To us."

Blue eyes met blue as delicate champagne flutes clinked. A long, quiet moment passed as the pale gold liquid fizzed and foamed. From an open window, the heady aromas of night-blooming flora perfumed the breeze that stirred the silken curtains. It was beautiful.

And it was too much. Beka's lips twitched, and try as she might to suppress it, a snorting laughing rang through the room a moment later. Dylan raised his eyebrows, but he soon succumbed to his companion's infectious mirth. The two of them giggled and chortled and wheezed until their eyes were streaming and their sides aching.

"Seriously Dylan, 'to us'?" Do people actually say that? In a place like this?" She waved her hand around the lushly decorated suite. "Is there really anyone in the Known Worlds that dedicated to cliché?"

He grinned. "You know, I think I read that exact line in one of those holonovels you pretend not to read."

Beka leaned across the round, spindly-legged table and smacked him on the shoulder. "I told you, those aren't mine! Um, an old crewmate left them on board the Maru. They have, uh, sentimental value."

"I'm sure they do," he replied, his voice dropping with undisguised innuendo. "I'm sure they're brimming with... sentimental value."

Beka thwacked him again. "You're ruining the moment, you idiot."

He caught her hand mid-slap and held it against him. She glared and struggled a bit to free her hand, but he just brought it to his lips, kissed it gently, and smiled. "Need I remind you, you're the one who couldn't keep a straight face after that _heartfelt _toast I made."

A slow smile crossed Dylan's face as he turned her hand and kissed the delicate skin of her wrist. "I'm really very insulted." He drew her fingers to his lips and kissed them one by one as he continued to speak. "Wounded, in fact. I'm a very sensitive man, Beka." His voice had dropped an octave from his usual commanding tone to a much more intimate register, low and caressing.

Beka shivered as she watched his mouth press against the tips of her fingers. "Okay," she said, with the slightest quaver in her voice. "You made your point. I'm a heartless bitch."

He caught her eyes, and a smile spread oh-so-slowly across his face. "Oh, well," he protested in mock-solicitious tones, "I wouldn't go that far."

With her hand still trapped, Beka stood up and took two steps until she was standing close enough to Dylan to pull him to his feet. "You," she began before tugging him close for a kiss, "are the most difficult man I have ever known. And that's saying something."

"Mm, I'll take it as a compliment." He drew her into his embrace, and the glasses of sparkling cider slowly loss their fizz on the delicate little table as the two of them buckled down and started enjoying in earnest their first night truly alone together.

-o-

On the Andromeda, Trance was tending a new shrub, one that sprouted hundreds of the smallest, pinkest petals she had ever seen. She was humming happily as she snipped away leaves that had not survived the the transit when something dark crossed behind her eyes. Her sure fingers slipped, and one blade of the gardening shears sliced deeply into a live branch. When she returned to herself a moment later, she gasped at the damage and hurried over to her plant first aid kit.

She soon lost herself in her work again, but this time, she was not humming.


	2. Chapter 2

Two chapters in one day! I have a bunch of these already posted at , but I don't want to flood anyone's inbox. They'll be coming fast until is all caught up!

**Chapter Two**

"Don't you have something better to do with you ill-gotten gains?"

The Merovege snapped her long, elegant fingers, and silent figures swathed in black emerged from the shadows. "If you're sober enough to be witty," she piped in her girlish, breathy tone, "you're sober enough to hold still during your dosing." A quicksilver smile flashed across her dimpled cheeks. "Or are you?"

The man in front of her twitched at the sound of her voice, but he could not yet hear the figures in black approaching, nor could he see them making their soft-footed way toward him. "Doll, I'll never be that sober," he drawled. "I thought you knew me better than that."

The Merovege's full lips pursed in a plump moue as she waved the quiet ones forward. She shook her head, tossing golden curls that glinted a shade brighter than nature under the nearest chandelier. "So pretty," she murmured, "but so stupid."

"Yeah, we're like that," the man agreed. "Pretty but stupid. Beauty queens, the lot of us." He squinted at her. "Hey, are you sure you're not related?"

Her lips tightened. "Dose him," she spat.

He writhed against the restraints at his wrists, ankles, and neck. As his struggles re-opened the angry red wounds that scored his clammy skin, an expert pair of hands held his head steady with no more apparent effort than they would have held a teacup. Another pair of hands produced a clear vial of white liquid from somewhere, along with a dropper.

"It won't do you any good!" he shouted. "I'll never give her up! I won't betray her, not again!"

The Merovege huffed and crossed her arms, watching the scene in front of her. One drop, then two, splashed into the man's dark eyes, rolled back into his eyes as he panicked. Before a full minute had passed, the man's exertions had slowed and then ceased. Her dimples bloomed again at the sight of suddenly cooperative captive.

"Oh, you silly man. You betray her everyday."

***

When Beka blinked into consciousness, a little flutter of panic rose in her throat at the sight of her unfamiliar surroundings. She reached out to find fresh linen under her sheets, soft and clean and still lightly scented with detergent. The blankets on one side of the bed were thrown back, and then she remembered where she was. She sank back into a mattress that managed to be both soft and supportive and stretched her toes down to the wooden footboard at the other end of the bed.

Delicious aromas of breakfast wafted in through the open door, and a moment later, a gleaming silver cart pushed by a tousled-headed Captain Hunt followed. The rich smell of coffee woke Beka up, and the sight of her boyfriend shirtless, with his curling hair all a-muss made her smile.

"I see her lady is awake," he said in a slightly sleep-roughened voice. "May I interest her lady in breakfast?"

She sat up and positioned one of the fluffy pillows behind her. "Mmm, you can. What do you have here?"

With the flourish of a professional waiter, he whisked the silver tops from the plates to reveal platters of thick-cut bacon, golden eggs, enormous steaming buns, and hot fruit topping. A shining pot of coffee and two glasses of juice completed the picture.

"And I thought the Andromeda fed us good," she commented as she surveyed the offerings. He rolled the tray closer and from the other side of the bed retrieved a long wooden plank with two short, wide legs on the ends.

"I wasn't sure what you'd want, so I ordered a little bit of everything."

A trill of laughter burst out of her – she would have sworn that he sounded _nervous_. As if she wouldn't love both the food and the thought he had put into serving her breakfast in bed. "I'll choke it down somehow," she replied with a wide grin. "Now get in here." She patted the empty space beside her on the bed.

With a few efficient movements, he had laid out plates, silverware, and napkins for both of them on the plank before managing to slide back into bed.

"Now it's perfect," she said, nearly burning her fingers as she took the plate of eggs.

They talked and laughed as they ate, and somehow a blob of the fruit topping ended up on Dylan's bare shoulder. With a wicked little laugh, Beka licked it off, and then somehow another glob of the fruit made its way to her neck. Fortunately, it was no longer steaming by this time, just a bit warm on her sensitive skin.

Ever so slowly, Dylan licked the fruit from her neck with methodical little flicks of his tongue. Beka giggled and squirmed, and when he finished, she hurriedly loaded the leftover plates and utensils back on the cart and knocked down the serving plank.

They did not stir again from the bed for another hour or two. Finally, feeling awake and invigorated, Beka pulled Dylan and herself out of bed. They giggled like furtive teenagers as they explored their suite wearing as little as comfortably possible. Beka threw open the massive window in the sitting room and basked in the warm sunshine that streamed inside.

"Why Captain Valentine," Dylan observed, "it looks like you're actually enjoying the weather."

Without turning around, she replied, "If weather usually behaved like this, I might have to reconsider my stance on the general subject."

As she stood in the sun with her face tipped back, Dylan padded across the room, steps muffled by the thick carpet, and wrapped his arms around her waist. He nuzzled her neck, and she sighed happily.

"I don't suppose I'm going to wake up in a moment," she said after a quiet minute. "This kind of thing doesn't happy to me, to anyone named Valentine. We don't wake up in gorgeous hotel suites, eat gorgeous breakfasts, and canoodle with gorgeous men. You can tell me the truth Dylan – did you slip me a hallucinogenic drug in my coffee this morning?"

He chuckled. "No, we're really here. When are you going to believe it, Beka? You're here, and what's more, you deserve to be here. We've worked so hard for so long now – do you even remember the last time you took a vacation?"

"A vacation? Is that where I drop Trance off to view the moulting of purple-snouted migrouses and then spend a week refitting the ship?"

"Not quite," he answered as he dropped soft kisses on her shoulder. "Do you really not remember the last real vacation you had?"

This time, her laugh was tinged with bitterness. "We've known each other for over a year now, Dylan, as you've scraped together a new Systems Commonwealth, but sometimes I think you don't really know how far civilization fell while you were asleep. A handful of people get vacations, but the rest of us get a week here or a few days there where no one's on our ass for a few credits or some imagined insult or Divine knows what. When we're in the black, Dylan? That's a vacation. This kind of thing? This is a dream."

He hugged her tight. "Not anymore it isn't. I'm not saying it's going to be like all the time, but I promise, things are going to get better. For you, for me, for the little guy... well, maybe not for the Drago-Kazov."

Beka shook herself and turned around to smile at Dylan. "I'm going to hold you to that, mister. Now let's get outta this place. It's great, but I'm starting to feel a little claustrophobic." The solemnity of the moment was broken, and he grinned back.

"Agreed."

As she turned away again to hunt a pair of clothes to wear outside, Beka's smile faded a little. Beautiful as this place was – or maybe because it was so beautiful – she could not shake the feeling that something was lurking in the shadows. Something or someone that was going to snatch this all away from her.


	3. Chapter 3

**ilexx**: I figured if there were any Andromeda fans left here, they might like to read it too!

**Mahlee Ash**: I have to admit, I'm more of a Beka/Tyr fan too, but I'm writing this for a fan who is a diehard Beka/Dylan fan. But as you'll see, I can't completely resist slipping in a tiny bit of Beka/Tyr goodness!

**Chapter Three**

The Merovege flounced onto her Aurier velvet settee. Infiltration on short notice took so much time and money and endlessly detailed research. She had spent all morning in her computer's VR matrix, checking security codes, personnel files, military satellite tracking images, aided only by her barely sentient AI. Someone with the Merovege's power and finances had people for this sort of headache-inducing – in a legitimate operation, it would have been delegated to an intern – but the Merovege had always possessed a knack for finding things, ever since she was a grubby little girl stealing credit discs to feed Auntie's habit.

That infuriating man, she thought as she tapped pink manicured fingernails on a nearby windowsill, had chosen one of the more safety-conscious lodgings for his little vacation. Unlike many of her social and business circle, the Merovege did not particularly enjoy a challenge for the pure joy of imposing her will upon the universe, to put it in Nietzschean terms. She preferred the more material things in life, and when she did deal in abstracts, she limited herself to revenge. Revenge worth having was always expensive in her experience, but it was one of the few ethereal concepts that gave her life meaning.

After a reviving lunch – the Merovege found that VR work tended to leave her famished despite the total lack of physical exertion – she returned to her captive. The drugs they administed to loosen his tongue cost her dearly, but like so many who had grown up in the squalor of the space-faring, little else could persuade him to talk. Only the desperately poor planet-bound were worse; the Merovege and most people she knew had given up on trying to extract information from the rare mudfoot who had something useful to say. The Nietzscheans claimed they could make them talk, but the Merovege would have bet money that they tortured their kludge cousins purely for the sadistic glee of it.

Her prisoner was sleeping fitfully when she approached, and he woke too late to offer much of a struggle. His pupils dilated, and his heart raced. She smiled. The effects of pure Flash were too erratic and too damaging, but when mixed with an equal proportion of a common animal tranquilizer, it yielded a soothing disinhibitor.

"It looks like you're going to get something out of this sad affair yet," she said perkily. "I have a job for you, and my employees can tell you that I pay very generously."

His eyes rolled back in his head as he nodded slowly. "Whaaaat job?" he slurred.

The Merovege frowned. At the levels required to ensure his docility, the effects of the drug were obvious to anybody who looked twice. She hoped there would be some way to use him without actually allowing him to open his mouth.

"You're just going to take a walk. That's all. Just take a walk and catch the eye of a pretty lady. You can do that, can't you?" she cooed.

"IIIII c'n waaaaaalk past a purrrrrty lady, suuuuuuure." A dopey smile crossed his thin features, handsome before she had found him hustling tourists on Dega Drift.

She would have to send somebody trustworthy with him to watch him, she decided. He would attract far too many eyes in a place like that, in a state like this.

"Thank you very much," she said sweetly. "I'm sure you'll do a wonderful job, and then you can go back home and forget all about our time together." A few more days of this would fry his short-term memory, a helpful side-effect of this drug cocktail.

***

"Now I remember why I hate planets!" Beka moaned. "Ecosystems. Bugs. Poisonous plants that nothing else can survive without. If we were meant to undergo this kind of torture, the Divine wouldn't have given us spaceships."

Dylan made sympathetic noises as he gently stroked ointment over an angry purpley-red rash that flamed from her left ankle halfway up her leg. "They did warn us," he ventured.

His lack of empathy earned him a slap across the head. "I thought it was... local color or something! What kind of savages are these people?" She flopped back onto the lushly padded lounge chair and moaned again.

A moment later, she propped herself up again. "Well, maybe it won't be a complete loss. Now I get to keep you locked in our rooms all day. Who hikes on a romantic getaway anyway?" She was pale, but a grin flickered across her face.

Dylan lay a soft kiss on her knee. "Right as always, Captain Valentine. Unless..." he grinned back, "unless that was your dastardly plan all along. Wandering into the burning clover, get a little rash, and drag me back to the b edroom to have your nefarious way with me."

"Little rash?!" she shrieked as she threw a pillow at him, which he narrowly ducked. "What are you, viewing it from space? I'm in searing pain here!" But she was laughing as she launched her missile, and for a moment they managed to forget about the unfortunate mishap.

A combination of soothing ointments and Dylan's very affectionate nursing had Beka back in her usual high spirits in no time. They took supper on the little balcony attached to their suite, where she cracked endless jokes about the hellhole he had brought her to, which he endured good-naturedly. In response, he constructed elaborated scenarios about nature walks, climbs, float trips, and spelunkings that left her shrieking in mock terror.

"Spelunking?!" she exclaimed. "That sounds like a Than mating ritual. I don't even what to think about what you could catch spelunking."

He laughed, but before he could form a reply, a figure several hundred meters away caught Beka's eye, and she froze.

"Beka? What is it?" As he turned and craned his neck to see what had arrested her so completely, she leapt up in a scramble and a moment later fell back into a heap, cursing.

"Ow! This damned bandage tripped me up. Dylan, it's Rafe! Over there, on the path to the river."

He opened his mouth to protest the extremely low odds that her scam artist brother had shown up at this hotel, on this planet, at this moment, but as he squinted, he saw with amazement that whoever he was, he looked exactly like the Raphael Valentine he – fortunately or unfortunately – met.

"Stay there," he commanded. "I'll find out what's going on."

She forced herself back to her feet and pushed her way up the low balcony wall. "Are you crazy? He's my brother – I can't just wait for you to report back!" But even as she spoke, the ankle flared red-hot, the bandage snagged on the wrought iron railing, and she collapsed again. "Damn it," she swore. "Hurry up!"

With a nod, Dylan vaulted smoothly over the railing, landed in a neat roll, and took off at a tear across the impeccable lawn. Beka watched with equal parts frustration and agonizing impatience as he closed the distance.

Her frustration and impatience transformed into heart-stopping horror when she saw the camouflaged figures creep out from behind manicured shrubbery. She screamed, but it was too late. It seemed that whoever had planned this knew Dylan's reputation too well. They did not bother engaging him in hand to hand combat but injected him with a dart she saw glint in the bright sunlight have a second before it buried itself in Dylan's neck.

As he swayed, they dashed out to catch him and bundled him away into a neaby wheeled vehicle. One of them grabbed Rafe by the collar and jerked him inside, but before the door slammed shut, Beka could have sworn that she caught her brother's dark eyes, glassy and touched with something that might have been sorrow.

She screamed again and scrambled over the fence, distantly aware of the excruciating pain at her ankle. The bandage tore loose as she ran, and even after the vehicle had disappeared around a corner, she sprinted as best she could until the adrenaline that had fueled her mad dash drained suddenly. Pain consumed her world, and her vision went black.

***

"That bastard!" Harper cried as Beka's tense and pale features stared at them from the viewscreen. "I'll kill him! Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I kick the crap out of you!"

"Agreed," Rommie intoned coolly from her station. "With the sentiment, if not the precise course of action. Harper, best speed toward Tilli'a. Tyr, do yu think you track down Mr. Valentine?" She spat the name.

"You're asking me to locate one drug-addicted human floating amidst the filth of the Known Worlds?" His lips quirked in a small, deadly grin. "At last, a challenge." He strode out of Ops into the bowels of the ship.

"At least he's happy," Harper muttered.

Rommie rolled her eyes. "Trance, inform Rev, and tell him ot meet us in Medical. I have a feeling that Beka will want to see him."

Trance frowned as she studied the haggard image of her crewmate. "Funny," she murmured.

"What, you're with the Uber now?" Harper asked incredulously.

She shook her head. "Not funny ha-ha. Funny strange. If they wanted to kidnap Dylan, why would they send Rafe?"

Rommie gave her a long, assessing glance. "Good question,' she answered crisply. "One I intend to put to Mr. Valentine as soon as I can." Her voice was grim, but there was a glint in her eye not unlike Tyr's deadly little smile. She was a warship, and someone had declared war on her crew.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

Surveying the scene before her, the Merovege huffed. "Just this one? You didn't get her too?" Her crystalline blue eyes flashed with muted fury. "I told you and told you, she's the one I care about!"

One of her minions began to respond, but she cut him short with a curt wave of her elegant fingers. "I'm not interested. What did you do with the bait?"

"Dumped it," the man answered. "He remembers his own name but not much more."

She giggled her little-girl laugh. "I suspect this one's friends," she said as she idly kicked the comatose body at her feet, "will have a few choice words for him." Her lips curved into an angelic smile as she contemplated the immediate future of Raphael Valentine. "Dismissed," she said airily to her employees.

"This may work out nicely in spite of their bungling," she murmured breathily to her newest captive, bound to the floor by four titanium-enforced manacles. "Perhaps I can convince her to deliver herself to me without all this fuss." Still smiling the smile that had broken dozens of hearts across the Known Worlds, the Merovege aimed a vicious kick at the man's ribs, eliciting a groan with the sharp triangle point of her boot.

"Dylan... Hunt," he said between belabored breaths. "Captain. Serial... number..."

She cut off the recitation with another kick. "Save your breath, Captain," she whispered as she knelt just outside his reach. "I'm not interrogating you, and if I were... I promise, you would tell me anything and everything I asked." She giggled. "I'm not saying there won't be torture, but it won't be for your sake. It's for hers."

His eyes flew open, and for the first time since grasping consciousness, he struggled against his shackles. "Beka," he rasped, "What do you want with her?"

"I think that's between two girlhood friends, Captain. I must admit I'm impressed that she landed somebody like you. The single most powerful warship to be found, a burgeoning alliance encompassing... is it forty-five worlds now?... and a chiseled jaw on top of it."

Leaning in closer, keeping a careful eye trained on his hands, the Merovege stroked the uneven stubble on his cheeks with a glossy fingernail. "I remember when Beka Valentine found her boyfriends on the street corner, so to speak. Don't look so surprised, Captain. I'm sure that she's still a self-righteous little bitch on the subject of mind-altering substances, but surely she didn't delude you that she's as pure as the driven snow." Her button nose crinkled as she laughed.

"She loves that death trap ship of hers—more than you and more than life itself, in all its joy and misery. She will do anything for it."

"If you harm a hair on her head, I swear I will hunt you down. I'll—"

The Merovege rose smoothly and smothered a delicate yawn as she pressed her heeled boot on his exposed throat. "I won't need you again for some time, Captain. You look far too healthy to be of any use." She spun on her heel and exited the bare, concrete cell.

***

When Tyr had nearly finished packing for his mission, a chime sounded, and a moment later a startingly pale Beka Valentine strode into his quarters, fairly vibrating with nervous energy. He raised an eyebrow and continued packing. Since she had entered into a romantic relationship with their captain, they had spent little time alone together. He was not entirely sure how their friendship had changed; that charge of adrenaline still filled the air when they brushed by each other.

"I'm going with you," she announced without prelude. "I'm all ready. We can take the Maru. I know some people who might still keep in touch with Rafe, and I guarantee he owes money to every major casino in three galaxies."

"Somebody else is orchestrating this," he rumbled. "Your brother is many things, but I do not believe willfully malicious to be one of them. This person knows you and will be tracking your ship's every move. I'll take one of the slip fighters and quietly leave it on the side of metaphorical road before continuing in something rather less conspicuous."

She paced back and forth, running her fingers incessantly through her blond hair so that it stood up and tufts and spikes almost as wild as Harper's. "Fine, whatever, those slip fighters slip two. Um, if they're... comfortable... like that." She paused in her pacing to shoot a sidelong glance at Tyr, which he ignored.

"You are not accompanying me." His voice remained as glassy-smooth as a frozen lake. "Stay here. Talk with Rev. Plot the no doubt creatively painful injuries you will inflict upon whomever has done this. Tyr to talk the ship out of launching a Nova bomb when we find our culprit; I doubt our honorable Captain would approve."

She cracked a smile, and her fingers fluttered out of her hair. "Very funny, Tyr." She swallowed. "But seriously, I can't just sit here and do nothing." She cracked her knuckles. "I haven't landed a hard right hook in a long time."

Tyr turned from his chore and crossed the deck to where she stood, miraculously still for the time being. With a little half-smile of his own, he held up his hands in a gesture they both knew well. "That, at least, we can rectify."

She gave him a quizzical little laugh, but he just nodded. "I have let you fall behind in your training. This is an unexcusable failing."

She shrugged and fell into a fighting stance. The first blow she struck failed even to rock his hand. He shook his head and sighed. "Again."

A frown crossed her face as she tried to concentrate on her target. She inhaled deeply, and as she pivoted from her hips, exhaled sharply and focused her energy onto his left palm.

"Better," he barked. "But still below your standards. Focus. Breathe. And hit me woman." These last words came out in a low growl.

She lashed out her right fist, as usual, but a lightning-quick reversal sent the Nietzschean tottering from a very decent left jab. "Good," he began, but she had not finished. She sunk an elbow into the hard muscle of his abdomen and landed a palm strike to his chin that nearly severed his tongue, before he grabbed her wrists and held her in a suffocating embrace.

"Hold onto that," he hissed as she fought his grasp. "Your Reverand Behemiel will counsel forgiveness, but trust me in this, Beka. Keep your anger at hand. Nurse it as you would a spark in the icy darkness."

Her arms eventually relaxed, and she let her cheek rest against his chest. "This may test you to the limits of your strength," he said softly into her ear," but not beyond. Remember this, if you remember ntohing else. I have faith in you, Rebecca, and so does our Captain Hunt."

She drew back and took a deep, slightly shaky breath.. Heat flared around them as their eyes met, but she broke the spell a moment later with a nervous laugh. "Thanks. Um. Are you okay? I sort of... saw red there for a minute." She reached up as if to touch the spot where she had hit him but quickly snatched back her hand.

His face relaxed into a wry smile. "I'll recover, and besides, battle scars may lend me a fearsome aspect that will prove useful over the next several days."

Her chest heaved in a sigh. "You're not going to relent, are you?" He shook his head. "Tyr, why are you doing this? Really? Do you... do you think I'd get in the way? That I couldn't stand to see you... interrogate Rafe, when the time comes?" Her blue eyes stared beseechingly into his.

"Truthfully, I believe you will accomplish much more staying here and assisting the others. And perhaps I am not the best companion for you at this time. I fear we would try each other's tempers in such close quarters."

In the air between them hung unsaid something else, another reason they both knew it would be best to keep distance between them. Beka loved Dylan without question, loved him as fiercely as she had ever loved, if not more, but the air between her and Tyr had always crackled. The extreme stress and very close quarters might have the opposite effect of the one Tyr had described.

And they both knew that such a move would sour their friendship because Beka would never forgive herself.

***

The day after Tyr left was the day the first of the vids arrived. Delivered by one of the nicer couriers, Beka originially assumed it was Commonwealth business. Her heart beat out a staccato rhythm in her throat. "Onscreen," she ordered, proud that her voice shook only a little.

Characters in blocky Common flitted across the screen. "Rebecca Valentine, for your viewing pleasure." She momentarily forgot her grief in bewilderment that quickly gave way to fury. It was them, she was sure. Whoever they were.

"Rommie, that courier didn't include a return address by any chance, did he?"

At her console, the android shook her head. "That's a negative. Wait a minute..." Her eyelids fluttered closed for half a second. "There's something embedded deeply within the data. I'm not sure we're meant to find it. I..." She shook her head again. "I can't read it, but Harper might have more luck in my VR matrix."

Beka frowned. "It's not going to hurt either of you, is it? This could be a trap, some sort of virus."

"I've sealed it off behind a firewall in case, but I believe it's safe." Her dark, almond-shaped eyes met Beka's. "We still have the vid. Are you... would you like to watch it now or--"

"I'm as ready as I'll ever be," Beka broke in, a little more harshly than she meant to. Rommie just nodded, both programmed and experienced in dealing with stress-induced irritability from her organic crew.

Trance strolled into Command just as the letters faded from the screen. They were replaced by a shot of a dingy, concrete cell, empty except for a huddle in the center of the floor. Without a word, Trance padded over to Beka and lay a purple hand on her shoulder. Beka swallowed and gave a tiny nod. As the shot focused on the huddle, she felt her stomach tighten. She recognized the snug brown trousers she had dubbed sexypants, now cut halfway up both legs to accommodate heavy metal shackles on his ankles.

Beka's breath hissed through her teeth as the camera lingered on the bruises to his exposed chest and arms. Dried blood flaked on his cheeks and his upper lip, and sooty black marks on his sides attested to liberal use of one of the more violent shocking instruments. It was only when she felt moisture on her neck did she realize that tears were streaming down her face.

A breathy voice spoke somewhere off camera as Dylan stirred and moaned in his uneasy slumber. There was no way he could find a position that would not force him to place his weight upon a splotch of purple or smudge of electrical burn.

"Rebecca," the voice murmured, "Do you see what you have driven me too? You were meant to be here as well. You would have taken most of these wounds, leaving your lover relatively unharmed. Can you understand the consequences of thwarting me, Valentine? When I send for you, you will present yourself when and where I say. Alone."

The voice tickled a memory at the back of Beka's mind, but she couldn't place it. She felt her face grow hot with mingled rage, fear, and guilt. "I'll thwart you back to the Stone Age, you bitch," she muttered. Anything else she might have had to say died on her lips when a figure clothed head to toe in black entered the camera's range and approached Dylan's unconscious body. Her breath caught in her throat. "Oh no." Her voice came out in a creaky whisper.

The figure wielded a silver instrument and metal-tipped shoes. It was all very primitive and horrifyingly effective. Dylan's eyes shot open at the first blow of the instrument, and his face contorted into a rictus of pain as the instrument flared red at his side. Every blood vessel on his face seemed to bulge as his back arched from the electrical shock. When he began to choke, the figure kicked him roughly onto his side, knelt to pull back his sweat-soaked hair, and mashed his face against a grate set into the concrete floor.

"By the time I send for you, you'll wish I had killed him," the voice continued. The stark threat raised goosebumps on Beka's flesh, all the more eerie for the girlish voice that pronounced it. "If you do not present yourself, I'll make this look like a day at the spa." The complete lack of bravado in the speaker's voice disheartened Beka more than the violence onscreen and Dylan's screams. This woman had the quiet, secure confidence that stemmed from absolute certainty and long experience.

She knew then that no matter how anybody would argue with her, Beka would come running when this evil woman called her. If she had to sabotage the Andromeda to escape Rommie's well-meaning clutches, she would. Nothing would keep her from Dylan.


	5. Chapter 5

**ilexx: **Thanks! I wasn't able to change it at EI, but I do like this title.

**BLA the Mouse**: Thank you! More shall be revealed, bit by bit. And thanks especially for the character stuff. I thought it would be hard to slip back into Andromeda fanfic after so long, but I guess I still have the feeling for them!

**Chapter Five**

The Merovege cradled a silver frame and the old-fashioned photograph encased within. A picture-perfect family gazed out from behind the glass, slightly stiff holding the pose, but the smiles that spread across their faces shone with genuine happiness. A tall man with a mop of unruly blond hair, yellow as the Terran sun and the hearts of daisies, had one arm wrapped around a short woman and his other hand clutched by a laughing little cherub with perfect ringlets and a balloon. The woman was a lush redhead who held a sleeping infanct in her arms and beamed a pearly grin amidst a waterfall of slightly frizzy curls.

At one time, a young Beka Valentine had envied her this family and the picture that proved how happy they had been. Back then, the Merovege – who went by a very different name in those days – had not understood subtlety and had gloated endlessly over the other children whenever the salvagers met up. She would recount breathless tales of the adventures they had together, dwelling not on the high-intensity action, which they all experienced weekly, but on the ways her family worked together to emerge victorious at the end.

The Merovege laughed bitterly, a sound she never uttered when another sentient being might be in hearing range. After all, that blonde cherub in the photograph had a reputation to maintain. "And I wondered why they hated me." Her gleaming fingernails caressed the frame for another minute before she returned it to its unassuming corner atop a low wooden stand.

Her pale pink slippers whispered across the floor as she made her way to the wing of her manor devoted to business. Floating chiffon in shades of rose and cream rippled with her every step, and the ringlets that were still perfect three decades later bounced gently against her neck and shoulders. When she entered the back room, she presented quite a jarring contrast to the spotless equipment, all metal and moulded plastic.

"How is the boy's recovery proceeding?" she asked without preamble.

A good half of the tech wizards inside jumped at the sound of her soft voice, and the other half ignored her completely. One of the techs who had jumped – a young woman in a wrinkled plaid shirt and green canvas pants (truly unfortunate, the Merovege thought) – tapped something on the nearest screen and turned to face her employer.

"He's alive, as you requested. Um, we don't think he's saying anything dangerous to anybody. It's a good day when he can remember what month it is." She tapped the screen again and squinted at it. "Um. Some of the small time sharks are circling. Probably wondering if he's running another scam. Do you, um, want their names?" She blinked at the Merovege and tugged at her eye-searing shirt.

"I do not. Is that all?"

The young woman glanced at her screen and frowned. "Ye... um, wait. This just in from intel. Someone else is looking for him. We're processing it now." She blinked again and ran a hand through her rat's nest of brown hair. "It's someone... ouch. That's not pretty."

A small, delighted smile curved the Merovege's rosebud mouth. "That will be the formidable Tyr Anasazi, I believe. Tell me, what is your personal opinion of our security protocols?"

The woman's eyes widened, and her fingers plucked nervously at each other. "Security, ma'am? Well, um, we have better firewalls than some of the smaller governments, and with randomized passwords and mandatory re-sets, not to mention the Trojan horse that automatically downloads into any computer accessing our system unless the operate follows the correct steps, um-"

The Merovege cut off the recitation with a wave of her hand. "Not that. Securityfor our agents. Intel."

Her employee's eyes darted around the bustling room. "Intel. Um. That's not my area of expertise, but, um... nobody's been compromised since I've started working here. If it's set up as meticulously as the computers, it must be good. Um. You run a tight ship," she concluded with a weak smile.

The Merovege reached out to grip the young woman's shoulder lightly and gazed into her eyes. She knew the effect her crystal blue eyes had at on her fellow human beings at this close proximity, even those who had no sexual interest at all in human woman. The rose shades of her dress set off the light blush on her cheeks. "Thank you," she murmured silkily. After a long moment as the woman's mouth hung slightly ajar, the Merovege turned and left the room. Unless she completely missed her guess – and she had not done so in years – that technician would stand rooted to that spot, gaping at the door, until one of her co-workers nudged her back to reality.

The Merovege possessed supreme confidence in the powers she enjoyed over otheres, but it was always fun to remind herself. Heterosexual men were almost too easy. So it was with an extra spring in her slippered stepp that she trekked down to the cells to make another gift for Rebecca Valentine.

Dylan was unconscious when she found him, as usual. His slumber demonstrated just how profoundly she and her people had abused him; a military (rumored black ops) man like that should have snapped awake at the sound of her approaching footsteps, satin-clad though they were, but instead he continued to twitch and mutter in his sleep. She contemplated his lean form, well-toned and tanned, attesting to both his ongoing commitment to keeping himself in shape and his recent vacation. His hair, a shade longer than she would have expected on a Commonwealth military officer, hung in sweat-soaked waves across his face, which was tense with pain even as he slept.

She brushed some of the hair out of his eyes, gentle as a mother with her newborn child, and then slapped him as hard as she could. His bloodshot eyes flew open and seemingly without conscious thought on his part, his hand shot out to wrap around her wrist. He squinted at her through eyelashes flaked with blood.

"Beka?"

She should have understood. Blond hair, blue eyes, fair skin, human. After the amount of – to his mind senseless – torture they had put him through, it was only natural that he should awaken wishing for the presence of his lover, even if he had been woke up by a resounding slap. But still mired in her childhood memories, the Merovege was perhaps not fully rational. She had let herself be caught by him, and judging by the iron grip he had on her arm, he would not inclined to let her anytime soon. At the best of times, she chafed at the feeling of being trapped; under these circumstances, it nearly unhinged her.

"I am not a Valentine," she hissed. "Release me immediately." As she spoke, her free hand snaked its way down to the knife holster at her thigh.

"Or what?" Dylan slurred. "You'll kill me?" He shook his head. Weakened by pain and deprivation, chained to the floor though he was, the Merovege nevertheless kenw real fear as he glared furiously at her with those hard blue eyes. "If you wanted to kill me, you would have done so days ago."

She forced herself to smile and modulate her voice to those dulcet tones everybody expected of her. "You're right," she all but cooed. "I have no desire to kill you. In fact, I have little desire to hurt you, though I must admit, when I consider how much pain our little recordings are inflicting upon a certain First Officer we all know, I do relish the task."

As expected, mention of his beloved further enraged Dylan, and he yanked her closer. The jolt covered her own action unholstering her blade quite nicely, and before he had a chance to deliver an angry retort, she had the razor-sharp edge of the knife pressed hard against the soft juncture between his neck and chin.

"Come to think of it," she continued in a thoughtful voice. "as much as it doubtless wounds her to see your bloody, battered body, just imagine how she'd feel upon seeing the throat slit on your handsome corpse." Her teeth shown in a beaming smile. "What do you think that would do to her?" She shifted the knife so that the point of the blade dug into his flesh, drawing a single drop of blood. After a long moment of what she was sure were silent threats on her person from him, he released his grip and shoved her away.

She would not give him the satisfaction of rubbing her injured wrist. Even in his weakened state, she reflected that he cut an impressively fearsome figure. She did not envy anybody brave or foolish enough to oppose a Dylan Hunt who stood proudly at the helm of his great warship.

"You know," she mused as soon as she had put a safe distance between herself and her captive, "you've actually given me a charming idea for my next gift to Miss Valentine. I'm much obliged."

***

"What, does the bum owe you money too?" The man wiped his sweating face with a rag and shook his head. "No, I don' know where he's been or what kinda scam he's been runnin', but if he got anything out of it, he's not enjoyin' it now."

Tyr slouched in his chair, opting for the moment for the quiet approach. This balding sack of human mediocrity was quite happy to talk at about Raphael Valentine given half an ear, and for now, Tyr was willing to have his talked off. "Behind on the rent?" he asked in his most nonchalant tone.

The man chuckled. "You could say that. Behind on the rent, the maintanance, the groceries, you name it. I tell ya, I been raking in a month's pay on Valentine alone. I don' know if there's gonna be much left of him by the time you get there, by if anyoe can squeeze anything outta that pathetic small-timer, I bet you can." He shot Tyr's biceps and appraising and slightly nervous look. A paper-pusher at ExpiFunds Universal, the largest provider of instant cash at exorbitant interest rates – known far and wide as Usurers Universal – Davidan earned three times his annual salary selling information on sought-after dobtors to loan sharks... after ExpiFunds got their pound of flesh, that is. The side gig paid well, but there wasn't much job security in illegally selling personal information, not the mention the inevitable tax evasion.

"I'll find something," Tyr drawled. He reached into his pocket and drew out a credit chip. "For your trouble," he said as he handed the little man his fee. He might make use of this man's services again, and there was no need to attract more attention to himself after that unfortunate incident with the slipfighter. The dealer recommended by an old business associate had professed his eager interest in the ship right up until Tyr requested the replacement vessel they had agreed upon. Suddenly the slipfighter wasn't quite up to par – scratched here, systems incompatible there, depleted fuel and weapons – and all he could offer Tyr was a pathetic handful of credit for his blackmarket supply business.

Difficult negotiators Tyr could respect. Even outright liars slick enough to pull their con long after they were beyond his reach could be tolerated, if only because he usually had better things to do, though they had best hope he not cross them again or get bored one day in their part of space. But this particular combination of bad faith and bald-faced incompetence offended him. He viewed it almost as an act of altruism to beat such people to a bloody pulp and leave them sobbing their gratitude that he did not do worse. That is, when he was feeling generous enough not to do worse.

Raphael Valentine's whereabouts were practically a matter of public record for anyone with a working knowledge of certain corporate and police databases, but Tyr wanted to be seen searching for him through the usual channels. The skinny little con man had not acted alone, nor, Tyr suspected, on much of his own impetus. Whoever had used him would be watching for Dylan's crewmates to wreak vengeance, and Tyr did not want to disappoint them. He would find Rafe, inflict the violence necessary for appearances with no little relish, and then appear to return to the Andromeda in a huff.

Two days later he reached the orbital habitat where Rafe was currently hiding out, too scared to run a con and too poor to do anything else. As he monitored the pale husk of the bright-eyed scoundrel, he could not help comparing the two Valentines he had met and finding this one severely lacking. From what he had gathered, Beka had earned a decent, if often dangerous and never luxurious, living as a salvage and general transport captain of her rusty, rickety ship, rising from the same muck Raphael had come from to make a halfway respectable name for herself.

As he monitored his quarry, Tyr confirmed his suspicions that somebodyhad manipulated Rafe – probably by some combination of force and mind-altering substances – into baiting Dylan and Beka. The haggard man spent his days drifting the corridors of Yroman Platform like an aimless ghost, doomed to haunt this callous little habitat without ever understanding why.

He might as well have dragged Rafe off by his scraggly hair for all the attention people paid the sad specter he made. The habitat's denizens made an effort to avoid noticing him, doubtless aware of all the unsavory characters who had spent the last few days since his arrival hounding him and pounding him flat when he had nothing to give them, not even a coherent promise that the money was coming.

When Rafe had settled into one of the darker corners for the hour or so of sleep he was able to catch at a time, Tyr padded behind him, silent as a stalking tiger. In one smooth movement, he clamped a hand on Rafe's shoulder and pulled him to his feet. The man moaned a note of unhappy surprise but offered no resistance. That, more than anything else Tyr had seen, sparked the barest hint of pity tinged with contempt. He remembered Beka's fierce struggle days before and grinned faintly. If Dylan did not appreciate what a spectacular specimen of a human female he had in his arms, Tyr resolved he would break them. Not even for Beka's sake—she was quite capable of handling her own affairs—but for Dylan's. Idiocy in such matters was inexcusable. Why, if she had been a Nietzschean… Tyr should his head, quashed that train of thought, and steered Rafe toward his quarters.

"Mr. Valentine," he rumbled softly, "you're looking significantly worse than the last time we met." When the man did not react, Tyr furrowed his brow in confusion. Was the brain damage truly so extensive. "Do you remember me?" he asked in what might have been a gentle tone under different circumstances.

Rafe turned to face him, eyes glassy with exhaustion. He sighed deeply and visibly tried to focus on Tyr. "No, I… wait." Something lit up behind his weary eyes. It was weak and fleeting, but it was more than Tyr had seen since he first encountered Rafe in this place. "Teee… Tahhh… Tare. No." Water gathered in the corner of his eyes and glinted briefly in the diffuse lighting.

"Close," Tyr replied. "I am Tyr Anasazi, weapons officer aboard the Andromeda Ascendant. Is that name familiar to you?"

The effort of thinking back took up so much of his feeble energy reserves that Rafe swayed on his feet. "Andrrrrr… me… yes. I know it. I…" His eyes widened suddenly, and he staggered toward the door.

"Warn her! I have to… warn. She wants… Rocket. Baby sssis. I have to…"

Tyr caught the man and was shocked when he struggled briefly in his embrace. Somewhere a remnant of Raphael Valentine lurked, and his skeletal limbs twitched and flailed as he gibbered helplessly. "Save your strength," he whispered. "I'll help you find her."

Rafe ceased his resistance and stared into Tyr's eyes with an oddly young expression of abject supplication. "You… help? Rocket? No, she… find the… lady. She's… bad. She…" He moaned, as if he could not find words to describe what this nameless woman had done.

"Who is she?" Tyr prodded when Rafe fell silent.

"She's the… angel. So… so…" Tears began trickling down his hollow cheeks. "Can't think. The… angel… hurt Rocket. Doesn't make sense."

An angel? At first, Tyr wondered if he had misheard Rafe, but when he repeated it, the word was clear. What could a celestial being associated with kindness, miracles, and old-fashioned religion have to

do with Dylan's kidnapping?

"I think… oh no. Teeeee, I think…" Rafe grasped the fabric of Tyr's shirt in his bony fingers and shook it with about as much force as a butterfly might muster. "Did something bad. Rocket, I… the angel. It was… but I saw… baby sister. Sad."

Tears soaked his pale face. "Sorry, Rocket. The… angel. Teeee… They hurt… Please no."

As Rafe lost his grip on Tyr's shirt and collapsed in a muttering, shaking heap on the carpet, Tyr regretted what he had to do. For Dylan, for Beka, for the Andromeda, even for Rafe, to avoid the attention of this deadly angel in the long term—not to mention for Tyr himself—it had to be done. After a moment's thought, he grabbed a hypospray for his first aid-cum-poison kit and injected a mild

sedative into the man's neck. He fell unconscious immediately and, malnourished as he was, Tyr's guess that he would not awaken during the violence proved accurate. His stomach turned as the idea of

beating an unconscious opponent, but he steeled himself and carried out the sickening task.

Before he dumped Rafe in the nearest clump of shadows, he injected him with an anti-inflammatory, a germicide, and a general vitamin supplement. His did not dare leave any money, knowing full well that

it would be stolen the moment anybody saw him eating real food. After another moment's search through his supplies, he found a packet of Andromeda's field rations he had packed and another containing a powder meant to be mixed with water for a sustaining, if repugnant, beverage. Rafe could still sneak into a restroom for a cup of water, Tyr thought a bit uncertainly. These he taped to the man's midsection with white bandages before stealing away into the night.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

Blackness without end, an emptiness so profound that it obliterated even Beka's sense of up and down, surrounded her as she gazed into infinity. It was like being adrift in space without a tether but worse because there were not stars. Fortunately, though, it was better than being in space because she did not implode. In truth, she was not physically here at all; her body sat comfortably in a padded chair, wearing the VR helmet that transported her consciousness here.

The blackness lasted only for a moment before Andromeda gave dimension to the place; this was a part of her vast AI that she had cordoned off in case the information they were investigating should provde dangerous. A silvery light bathed the what appeared to be a vast hall like a library, only with orderly rows of glowing code instead of stacks of books. A faintly flickering image of the ship herself appeared shortly thereafter, followed by Harper, who Beka almost laughed to see had appeared to change his clothes for the foray into VR.

"She's just as beautiful on the inside, isn't she, boss?"

Beka had to agree; she kenw ships rather differently than Harper did, but in VR, the graceful lines, the staggeringly complex artificial intelligence, and the smooth functioning of the ship were evident.

Andromeda rolled her eyes, but a small smile danced across her lips. "If you're done ogling my mind, Harper," she began in mock irritation," we have work to do. Beka, I asked you to come along in case you recognize any information we can decrypt from these recordings."

Beka closed her eyes for a moment against the images that arose in her mind when Rommie mentioned the recordings, her voice slightly tight. Dylan, chained to the floor. Dylan, bruised and battered and bleeding. Dylan, unconscious after screams had left him exhausted. She opened her eyes again and and clenched her fists.

Rommie continued. "The sender implied that she had some personal relationship with you. I'm hoping we'll find something meaningful to you."

Beka nodded and squared her virtual shoulders. So far, she had been going stir-crazy aboard this ship, berating herself for agreeing to let Tyr go haring off on his own. She could not remember why she hadn't followed him. But now maybe there was something she could contribute. Finally.

"Bring it on," she replied in a half-echo of Dylan.

Rommie glanced away, and a blink of an eye later, a glittering diamond curtain flared into life around them before dispersing a moment later.

"That would be the Great Wall of Rommie," Harper explained. "The firewall. Nothing's gonna get past it. I should know; I've been trying all morning to hack my way inside." Rommie shot him a smug look, and Beka tried to rein in her impatience. Usually Harper's uniquely geeky brand of flirting amused her endlessly, but this time, she just wanted to find the sadist who held her captain and boyfriend.

The three of them passed through the dim remnants of the curtain to face a great undulating sea of neon orange. "This recording came from a state of the art computer," Harper said. "Just top of the line. Not that our great goddess of knowledge and things-that-go-boom isn't a work of art – you'll always be the one for me, Rom-Doll." He pressed his hand to his heart and tried to look sincere.

Beka exhaled sharply. "Harper," she snapped.

He colored. "Right. Sorry, boss. Anyway um, hacking into the recording is one thing. It wasn't designed to hurt anything, and I'm pretty sure it's not packing. But try hacking into the mainframe that spawned this baby, and you'd get a nasty surprise, some kind of virus."

Was he ever going to do something useful? Beka crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows impatiently. "Okay, I'll keep that in mnd if I ever try to break into this sick bastard's computer. What does that mean for us now?"

"It means we can narrow down our list of suspects," Rommie explained. "Instead of the millions, perhaps billions of people who might want to hurt you or Dylan, there are maybe one thousand organizations and private individuals with these kinds of resources."

"Which is still a lot, even for Trance," Harper cut in. "that's why we gotta crack the nut and see what she tells us." He and Rommie waded into the orange sea, parting the waves with their hands and staring intently into the fine numerals of code that washed over them. Beka had seen VR work before, and it had not looked like this. She fidgeted, completely lost in this high-tech search. It seemed like an hour, but she knew logically that only a few minutes passed before something leapt out of the sea like a giant, winged fish. Instead of splashing back into the sea, though, it exploded like fireworks into a rapidly scrolling list of words Beka could almost read.

"There!" Harper exclaimed. "Gotcha! Slippery little fellow, aren't you?"

Rommie reached up and brushed the list with her finger; it stopped its scrolling immediately and grew large enough for Beka to read. "This is all just programming for the recording." Her lips whitened around the edges; although Beka could not read it, clearly she could. "There."

The letters began quivering and fading. Harper dashed over to where Rommie stood. "Crap!" he shouted. "It's programmed to self-destruct before anyone can decrypt it. Here we go, the directory information and the tags. Files and folders, blah blah blah. Let's see here..."

Beka squinted, trying to read the wiggling letters, and suddenly, something came together. "I see it! There's a name I recognize, or sort of." Rommie's eyes closed as she focused on maintaining the letters for a bit longer. "Tournai. What is that?"

"You're looking at the location of the server," Rommie replied in a perplexed tone of voice. "My database indicates that it was a city on Earth in the country of Belgium, which was annexed by The

Five during the twenty-third century water conflicts."

Harper winced. "Nasty stuff, the Water Wars. Until the Magog, it was probably the bloodiest period in Earths' history.

"It's not that," Beka insisted, shaking her head slowly. "But I know that name. When I was a kid. Somebody..." She frowned. That name held, if not the key, an essential component of finding the people who were torturing Dylan.

Harper and Rommie continued to look for clues in the orange sea of code, but the search was interrupted when Rommie announced that another message had arrive.d They agreed that Harper would stay in VR and Rommie would redirect her on-screen persona to join him.

A dizzying second later, Beka gasped and found herself in the chair again. She ripped the VR helmet off her head and ordered Rommie to play the recording. Once again Trance had found her way to Command just at the right moment. She took Beka's hand as the too-familiar room appeared on the screen.

"Rebecca Valentine," the voice she had come to loathe trilled off-screen. "I know you've been trying to find me, and I really can't blame you. After all the boyfriends you had on Degas Drift, Captain Hunt must seem like an angel from the heavens. I wouldn't want be eager to let him go either." She giggled.

"Angel," Trance whispered. But Beka was too distrated by the speaker's reference to a particularly painful stretch of her late teenage years to notice. By the time the unseen speaker loosed her annoyingly childish laugh, she was seething.

"Degas," she hissed. "Who is this person?"

Rommie eyed her sideways. "Does that mean something to you? Something that could help narrow down the list," she added hastily. That it meant something to Beka was evident from the flush that overspread her cheeks.

Beka took a few deep breaths to clear her mind of the red fury that washed over her. It worked a very little bit. "It's... hard to say. Someone could have accessed the arrest records."

Rommie's eyebrows shot up, but Beka was glad that she wisely refrained from inquiring further. As the camera focused on Dylan, Beka's stomach tightened as it had three times before. She wanted to feel nauseous, but a trace of something floral hung around Trance, soothing her slightly.

"I don't know why we bother watching these," Beka muttered. "It's always the same thing." And, she wanted to add but didn't, less her voice crack, every fresh bruise against his lightly tanned skin killed her a little more.

A lithe figure clothed entirely in black entered the room from a side door off-camera. The slim shoulder-waist-hip ratio suggested a young man, but Beka could not have said for sure. He, if a he he was, grabbed the unconscious Dylan by his matted hair and jerked his head back so hard that Beka expected to hear a sickening crack. She let slip a quiet whimper. This part was always the worst for her, no matter what followed—when they worke him up. The look on confusion, followed swiftly by surprise, the return of the pain from his wounds, and finally grim resignation, broke her heart.

And another senseless beating commenced. The faceless torturer flung Dylan across the rough concrete floor as far as his chains would allow, ripping open the mushy scabs on his face and neck. Dark blood oozed down his jaw and the beard that was growing in. The figure slithered across the floor and bent Dylan's right arm back at an impossible angle for a long, agonizing moment until it popped out of joint. Dylan screamed, and tears sprung to Beka's eyes.

She was going to kill them. She was going to give them what they had given Dylan, ten times over, and then she was going to kill them. Tyr would understand, and he would help her, she knew, though he might inititally try to talk her out of it. Somewhere in her heart, programmed through it was, Rommie would also understand, but her ethical constraints and commitment to Dylan's Commonwealth ideals would force her to stop Beka. Trance and Rev would be horrified to hear it, and Harper... a year ago, Beka would have been sure of his reaction, but out of all of them, she had realized that he needed the Commonwealth and its strange and wonderful brand of justice more than any of them. Raised on a garbage heap of a world mostly abandoned by its progeny, treated like the worst kind of rabid dog by anbydoy with a modicum of power, Harper had absorbed the tenets of cruelty and pain and tyranny from the moment he was born. And Beka could not bring herself to pull him down to that level again.

Her searing anger gave her something to hold onto as she watched the recording, unconscious of the tears that streamed down her face. And then suddenly, it wasn't enough. The figure in black was pressing his booted foot on Dylan's throat, and the recording suddenly shut off. Beka leapt from her console. "What the hell that?!" At the end of every other recording, the speaker had spoken a few taunting words as the camera lingered on Dylan's battered body, but this time, the screen flicked to black.

"It's not finished," Rommie replied, a bit tersely. If Beka had even noticed, she would have known not to take it personally. She forgot sometimes, but Rommie must have been suffering just as much as she was.

Plain white letters in Common flashed at the screen: _New Diamond Casino, Gamma Hangar, twenty three hundred hours_, along with a date ten days hence.

Beka's heart hammered in her chest. "Ten days?!" she exclaimed, her voice shrill with horrified surprise. "She's never gone two days without sending us more of these... things, and now we get a black-out??"

Trance squeezed Beka's hand. "He's fine," she murmured. "He's not well, but that video... Beka, please don't panic. That won't help you or Dylan."

Rommie turned to face them, and Beka saw what must have been an echo of her own tense, drawn expression. "I have to to believe that Trance is correct." Her voice was strained. "We know that she wants you, Beka. Captain Hunt is not their target." Beka wondered how much the android believed her own words; there was a brittle flimsiness to her voice that sounded to Beka's ears like a desperate effort to convince herself.

"How do we know that?" she argued, pulling slightly back from Trance's comforting presence. "The word of a sadist? She's been toying with us this whole time. Maybe by telling us she's after me, she was keeping us from going after Dylan." She felt her face growing hot. "You guys saw the other trhee—this one did not end the way the others did." She choked back a cry. "I can feel it. Something terrible happened to him."

Rommie's dark eyes held hers for a long moment. "If that's true, that's all the more reason that you must act with the utmost care," she finally whispered. Beka was startled to see a shine of tears glint under the bright lights of Command. "Tyr is the next in command. Can you imagine that?" she laughed weakly.

Beka tried to smile back. "He'd have the Nietzschean Empire up and running in a month," she half-heartedly quipped. "Rommie, I'm not going to promise anything," she continued as the smile faded quickly from her lips. "Can you honestly tell me that if you were in my shoes, you'd be careful and cautious?"

This was the closest they had come to openly acknowledging Beka's relationship with Dylan.

"I-" Rommie paused and suddenly turned to look back at the screen. "I'm getting a message. It's Tyr."

Beka's fingers gripped the console so hard they ached. "On-screen." She wondered if Rommie would provide difficult later on—as the Commonwealth's flagship, her priorities would not always align with Beka's—but now she had other things to think about.

"Audio only," Rommie announced. "He bounced his halfway across the galaxy, so it's a little corrupted."

A loud static hiss echoed through Command, and a moment later Tyr's baritone crackled around them. "My suspicions have been confirmed over the past several days. Rafael Valentine does not remember a thing about th-" The static drowned out his words for a few seconds. Beka cast a wild-eyed glance at Rommie, who shrugged helplessly. "-gel. That's all I could understand, but I had the impression that he was not talking about the typical angel, either in origin or character." His dry voice indicated that he was making a joke, but Beka's panicked brain didn't catch it. He paused. "He's not well. He's experiencing short-term memory loss, paranoia, and extreme confusion. My guess is that he was heavily drugged, and not by his own volition. I will continue my search, but you should expect an arrival a few hours after this arrived." He sounded amused at something.

Beka asked Rommie to clean it up and play it back, but the corruption was too far advanced.

"It was 'angel,'" Trance interrupted. "What he was saying about Rafe? He was talking about an angel. A bad one." Her eyes were wider than usual, worried and ever prescient. Beka did not like that combination.

"Angel," Beka said softly. "Tournai. It's..." She shook her head. "Rommie, tell me... Tournai. Something else. Angels. I... argh!" she screamed.

Rommie's cool lecturing voice washed over her, rattling off facts that failed to stir the slightest hint of memory. And then, "... saints in the Merovingian Empire. I'm not sure if they could be considered angels, but miracles were important to the faith of the-"

"Repeat that," Beka ordered breathlessly. "About the... that empire. What was it called?"

"Merovingian. Is that familiar?"

Beka nodded slowly. "She was obsessed with empires," she said, half to herself. "Said her family was descended from the Merov... whatever that is. Her perfect family. We were friends, as much as any of us were friends, but then..." Her blue eyes turned to Rommie, blazing with sudden understanding.

"I know who it is. And I know why she wants me."


	7. Chapter 7

**Max**: Thanks very much, I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it!

**Chapter Seven**

They had to deliver the news to Tyr, but nobody knew where he was. A thorough search of recent assault reports, trawled through by a loudly-protesting Seamus Harper, revealed where he had been, but the seemingly random smattering of drifts where he had probably been revealed nothing about his intentions. Trance would have contributed her inexplicable insight and lucky guesses, and Harper practically bounced on his toes and volunteered to go. Rommie insisted she that she would go, and Beka argued with them all just desperately enough to lead them to think that they had convinced her to stay.

She didn't dare think about her plan too much, lest Trance or Rev pick up something when they stopped by to check on her a little too often to be happenstance run-ins. Rommie might have noticed something too, attuned as she was to the physio-emotional state of the sentients on board. So Beka drifted through the rest of the day and the next, debating who would go after Tyr, keeping in the very back of her mind the certainty that she would be the one to go.

After her shift ended, her footsteps led her to the Maru, as they often did. She checked her supplies idly, brushing her fingerse over controls that currently lay dark. Harper had left a a flexi to himself, describing the latest upgrades he'd made the ship and noting the status of ongoing projects. Everything looked to be in order, ready for departure at a moment's notice.

All she had to do was distract Andromeda long enough to lift off. It would take a hell of a distraction of a suspiciously-timed diagnostic to convince Andromeda to open the hangar... unless, she thought suddenly, Andromeda had a reason to open the doors. No distractions necessary. She picked up harper's flexi again, reading more closely this time to see whether any of his work could theretically cause the Maru to vent something unpleasant, something Andromeda would want to expel.

Weapons, security, artificial gravity... a smile crept over her face. Life support, specifically, an emergency coolant that did not require power to work, to be activated if they were stranded someplace hot or developed an overheated enginge. When properly used, the cooland work as a slow time release mechanism, but the container was a delicate piece of machinery. A tiny spark could set off a noxious explosion of corruptive gas that Beka would need to immediately vent.

And on the Maru, certain innocuous activities were bound to produce sparks. Harper would not have thought to protect the container because she Maru was sitting quietly in Andromeda's hangars, unused by anybody except Beka on occasion. Now, if Beka were not aware of this addition to her ship and decided to, say, take a shower while running to coffeemaker and blasting her records...

With her plan in mind, Beka did not let herself stop for a moment. She picked her favorite fightin' music, an old earth rock group who sang in a language nobody spoke anywhere but whose incoherent shoutihg and manic energy always got Beka's pulse pounding. She bobbed her head in time with the first track and flipped on the coffeemaker after mixing the requisite grounds and pouring the water. Hey, who wouldn't like a hot cup of something after a long shower? Finally, she stripped off her clothes, wrapped herself in a towel, and with her heart in her throat, turned the knob that started the hot water flowing through the showerhead.

The results were not immediate. She stepped under th spray and sighed almost happily when the hot water hit her scalp. Halfway through washing her hair, the alarm she'd been waiting for began wailing, and Beka leapt out of the shower, still with foam in her hair. Leaving wet footprints behind her, she raced to the cockpit and jabbed the console.

"Beka, what's going on in there?" Andromeda demanded by way of greeting.

Beka brought up the Maru's internal sensor readings and relayed them to the warship. "I don't know," she replied breathily, allowing the fear she felt to seep into her foice. It was was a monumentally risky plan, a stupid one, but Dylan had recruited dozens of worlds to the Commonwealth using risky and sometimes stupid plans that managed to work out. He would understand.

Onscreen, the avatar furrowed her brow. "Beka you're overloading the Maru's electrical capacity. You have to turn off all non-essential machinery."

Beka frowned and dashed away to flick off the coffeemaker, the music, the shower, and the lights everywhere but in the cockpit. Two minutes later, she was back at the console, now shivering as the water dried on her skin. "It's not helping," she reported. "This has never happened before. Sometimes the power went out when the crew went crazy with the appliances, but It never set off the alarm." Her voice grew sharp with unfeigned worry and growing irritation at the sound of alarm.

A moment later, she smacked the console triumphantly. "I got it! Something Harper was working on, it's leaking corrosive fumes into the engine room."

Andromeda received the information from the Maru's sensor a heartbeat later. "You have to seal off the cockpit and vent the ship."

Beka nodded. "Copy that. I can... wait a minute." She raised her eyes to the screen and gave Andromeda her best puzzled look. "If I vent in the hangar, won't you have to vent it all a moment later?"

"That's correct," Andromeda replied. She wrinkled her nose and shivered as if her virtual skin were crawling. "It's a nasty compound. This hangar won't be clean for days. Beka, would you mind venting the gas directly into vacuum? I calculate that your enginges can tolerate another five minutes of the gas before they suffer damage."

Beka glanced down to hide the gleam in her eye. That had worked out even better than she had dared dream, getting Andromeda to suggest it for her. "No problem," she answered. "I'll be in and out in thirty seconds."

When she looked up again, the hangar yawned to reveal the diamond-studded blackness of space. Beka felt a familiar tug at the sight, so laced with possibilities, and her heart lept in her chest despite everything. She piloted her ship into that infinite void and vented the toxic gas. A delicate lavender spume issued from the Maru like smoke curling from a candle. She steeled herself and set a course away from the Andromeda.

The ship's avatar had disappeared from her screen during the venting process, but now she reappeared. A questioning expression passed over her lovely face. "Maru, you're clear for re-entry. You're clean."

Beka leaned back in her seat, still holding her towel against her chest, and smiled ruefully. "Good to know. Now that I'm out here, I figure I might as well have a look around, see if I can't find our wayward Nietzschean and maybe run into any childhood friends with vendettas against me and mine." She prayed that Andromeda would relent and let her go without turning this into something ugly, but looking into her fathomless brown eyes, Beka knew that was impossible.

"Beka, we agreed that the best way to help Dylan was for you to remain here while one of the others finds Tyr."

Beka shook her head. "That's not how I remember it. I remember all of you making decisions for me, like I was an invalid, apparently forgetting who Dylan designated as his First Officer. Acting Captain Valentine," she continued mockingly, "I hereby order you, as the only person who actually knows that crazy bitch holding your boyfriend captive, to hunt her down and get him back. Yes ma'am, Acting Captain Valentine." She finished the rant with a little derisive salute.

Andromeda was, predictably, not amused. "You're just going to go rushing out there, with no support or back-up, most likely to get yourself captured and tortured right alongside Captain Hunt." She narrowed her eyes as her tone changed from disbelieving to acid. "I thought you were a professional, _Acting Captain_. So did Dylan. You're acting like a child."

Beka's hands curled into fists. "Professional enough to escape the bubble you were trying to keep me in," she snapped.

"You damaged your own ship," Andromeda stated flatly. "I never thought you'd stoop so low." Beka cold see that her sabotage and hurt Andromeda personally, but she could not relent now.

"For Dylan, I'd do worse," she said softly. "Maru out."

Andromead did not attempt to contact her again, and before Beka could change her mind, she threw herself into slipstream. She thought back to Tyr's report, the bits and pieces that had been comprehensible. Angel. What would he do, she wondered, with that information? Religious institutions, brothels, pleasure resorts... She knew that he did not have enough information to find the woman herself, but how close would he get?

Dared she go after the woman by herself? She did hope to intercept Tyr and gain his assistance, but there was simply too much space to search and not enough time. No, she needed him, she decided. Beka Valentine was good, but Tyr had made a living getting into places he wasn't wanted, among other things. Either she could look for him for weeks and months, or she could get him to come to her. Just as they had tracked assault reports to locate places he had been, so would he be watching his channels to keep an eye out for his crewmates.

All she had to do was be seen. Well hell, she could do that. He would be checking his tracks, noting anybody who might be following him. All she had to do was hang around each of the drift where she knew he'd been; news would reach him soon enough. She wished she could have let off a little steam engaging in some violence of her own, but she wanted to stay under that woman's radar.

The next day was grindingly dull as she sat in cafes and tried to look like she was trying to look casual. Dammit, Tyr was the performance artist, not her. And Dylan, come to think of it. Not that Beka couldn't pull a con herself, but she was not in the mood. Her chest tightened, and her eyes burned as the last image she'd seen of him flashed through her head. She had forced herself to focus on what she was doing, on staying strong and carrying out her escape. But now that she was just killing time, she found that she could not stop herself from thinking about him.

A flood of memories washed over her. Dylan blushing when he caught a glimpse of her fresh out of the shower, running his hands nervously through his hair in a touchingly childlike gesture. She had enjoyed the effect she had on him, though not daring to hope that anything further would ever happen. Later he had confided to her that had barely restrained himself from pushing her against the wall and kissing her senseless, and she had laughingly asked him what had stopped him. Since then, he'd more than made up for it, finding corners on the Andromeda she had never known about to steal a kiss and sometimes more.

If she closed her eyes, she could almost feel the warmth of his touch on the back of her neck, his breath—always minty, somehow—on her cheek. Her lips parted slightly as she remembered his kisses, sometimes soft and sometimes searing. A footstep close behind her woke her suddenly from her reverie, and she looked up with a guilty flush to see Tyr standing beside her, eyebrow raised.

"Don't. Start," she said between gritted teeth. A less keenly observant person, a mere human for instance, might have thought her eyes had drooped shut after a weary day, but she was sure that he knew exactly what she had been thinking about. Even worse, his proximity and the amused curve of his lips reminded her of their own encounter, not nearly long enough ago. She glared daggers at him as he took a seat beside her.

"I wouldn't dream of commenting on the lady's sorrow," he rumbled."But I am very curious to know why you're here and however you persuaded our own fearsome warship to let you leave."

"I know who's holding Dylan," she answered quickly. Half-answered, really. "I'm hoping you can help me find her. You might even know of her, considering your colorful social circle." She made her voice light and bantering, like they were exchanging quips during gym training.

"No more colorful than yours, if you truly know who has orchestrated Captain Hunt's kidnapping. I must say, that was very deftly done." He drummed his fingers on the cafe table, scrutinizing her.

"Yes, and she may have very deftly killed him already," Beka replied acidly. She described the latest recording they had received. "And now she expects me to just sight around and wait!" she exclaimed.

Tyr nodded slowly. "If she knows you at all, she'll know how unlikely that is." He paused. "How _are_ you acquainted with this person?"

Beka sighed. "Our fathers were in the same business, salvage and transport. When your ship is your home, the whole family tags along for the odd party. We didn't have much chance. Her name was Clothilde back then, but she's going by something else now." She laughed weakly. "She was always so smug about her perfect little family—mother, father, baby brother, all ridiculously pretty. She used to say that they were descended from kings of ancient Earth. They might've been, for all I know." She fell silent, remembering.

"What makes you think this childhood friend desires such melodramatic revenge?" Tyr prodded.

Beka's eyes became very distant, like she was watching something occur a long ways away. "Her perfect family didn't stay that way forever. My father..." She swallowed. "He had a thing with her mother. Everyone knew it except the husband. And then one night, at one of the monthly drinking fests, they got careless. He tried to kill my father, but he was too drunk to land a punch." Her chest felt constricted, and she felt the old guilt bubbling up again.

"The next day, they found his body next to hers. Nobody knows exactly what happened. The only reason Clothilde is alive is that she was staying the night on the Maru, with me. I... I told her that nothing was going on, that the rumors were just gossip, just stupid lies."

"And so she blames you for complicity in your father's misdeeds?"

Beka nodded. "I think so. I never saw her or heard from her after that, but I heard that she got pretty bad afterward. Deluded, you know? All her kings and... I dunno." She shrugged.

"Clothilde. Do you recall a family name of some sort?"

Beka shook her head.

"It's an unusual enough name that I should be able to track her from that."

"Try Merovingian," Beka suggested. "That was the dynasty she liked to talk about. She..." Her voice trailed off when she saw Tyr's eyes widen slightly at the name. "Do you recognize the name?"

"The Merovege," Tyr murmured. He chuckled, and Beka stared uncomprehendingly. What could he have found funny about _that_? "Naturally you would, through little fault of your own, become embroiled in a blood vendetta with the founder of one of the most... thorough criminal enterprises in three galaxies."

Beka's eyebrows rose. "Thorough?"

"We should leave," Tyr said suddenly. "I wager that her agents are at most a day behind me, more likely a quarter of that. We'll take the Maru, if for no other reason than to leave it someplace less public."

Beka glared, but Tyr looked unimpressed at her anger. As she slammed a credit chip on the table, he leaned in close. "I don't want to hear an impassioned defense of your ship's capabilities. The Merovege _will_ track it; we will make the best of this poor circumstance by using the Maru to throw her off our trail."

Beka quickly steered them into an empty side corridor where they could keep an eye out for onlookers and avoid eavesdroppers. "I will not leave my ship to that woman's sadistic mercies," she hissed. "She knows how much it means to me; I'd be better off selling it for scrap."

"You ignored our vaunted ship's advice to come here, Beka, but you cannot afford to ignore mine, not now. If I thought I had any chance of persuading you, I would strongly advise you to destroy the Maru and be done with it. She would find it a much greater challenge locating us."

Beka froze in her steps and stared at him, aghast. He rolled his eyes. "But I'm not advising it," he continued dryly. "As a rule, Nietzscheans do not have death wishes."

She frowned and slapped him across his bicep. "Promise me that she won't touch it, and... we can talk about hiding the Maru, _temporarily_, while we hunt her down."

A thoughtful look crossed his face, and a long, silent moment passed as he regarded her with a deep, assessing look she knew well. She hated that look, like was cataloging and weighing every thought she'd ever had.

"I can safely promise that she will not lay a hand on your vessel, but I cannot say the same for her people. And before you object, consider what you're asking of me right now, if you can." His voice grew hard. "The Merovege is ruthless, but her true, crucial strength is her unerring and complete attention to detail. She is supremely methodical, and it is only because she is much more occupied with the affairs of her organization—and perhaps because I am able to call on especially eclectic persons for information—that she has not snatched us as we stand here and chat.

"She does not know me, Beka. She possesses the same intelligence as hundreds of others, much of which I personally fabricated. But you..." Tyr shook his head. "Frankly, Beka, you're an enormous liability."

Without thinking, she grabbed a handful of his shirt and yanked him down to eye level with her. "Frankly, _Tyr_, you and the rest of the crew were spinning your wheels until I figured out who we're after. And fine, we can find someplace to stash the Maru, and hey, I'll take your word on the finer points of stalking and breaking and entering. But you will not stand in my way when I'm face to face with that sick, murdering bitch."

Though she had pitched her voice to a soft whisper, Tyr reacted more strongly than she'd ever seen him respond to any shouting match. She could not have explained what curious expression ghosted over his eyes, but for an instant, despite the vast differences between them, she could have sworn that she was looking into a mirror. A lifetime of striving, of surviving, of outliving and most of all, of never forgetting—of never forgetting—the monsters welled up from behind his eyes like smoke behind dark amber.

And suddenly, her shoulders were slamming into the wall and her fingernails were digging into the flesh of his wide, muscled arms. His breath came hot and fast as she gasped against his lips. His hands slid under her shirt and dug into her waist. Heat and lust and every primal survival instinct flooded them as their mouths opened together. Her heart thudded like a caged bird in her chest. Her fingers trailed up his neck and tangled in his long locks, pulling him even closer. Her hips arched up to meet him, and he growled deep in his throat. He tore his lips from hers to descend on her throat, licking and nipping his way to her collarbone. She shivered. An especially hard nip stole the breath from her lungs. Her eyes flew open, and the reality of the scene in progress crashed down on her.

She pulled her hands to her chest and shoved him stumbling away. His lips curled in a snarl, and an icy wave of fear washed over her. He wouldn't...

He didn't. "We can't," Beka breathed. "You're not... he's..." She shook her head. "Even if he is... if he isn't... we can't, Tyr." She paused to steady her breath. "Dammit. You know we wouldn't be good together, Tyr."

"On the contrary," he growled. "We would be magnificent."

She stalked away as a hundred different emotions raged within her. She could not decide whether she was more furious with herself or with him, and she was sure that she would never forgive herself. If Dylan were alive, there was no way he would forgive her either. If he weren't... But it didn't matter. She would pray that he was alive, that she would be able to see the horror in his eyes when she told him about this kiss. Now she had to work with Tyr, work alone with him, to ensure that she found Dylan in whatever state he was in and that she inflicted all the pain on that woman that she had inflicted on Beka.

Tears leaked down her cheeks as her fingernails bit tiny red crescents into her palm. She didn't notice either as she floated inside a scarlet cloud of pure fury, intent on reaching the Maru and the next stage of her quest.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

Her lips were set in a hard, white line as she stared at the unmoving figure beside her. Machinery beeped slowly, reassuringly, but the news from her medics did not fill her with confidence. The man who had put Captain Hunt in this unfortunate position was languishing in solitary confinement and would continue to do so until she had crafted an appropriate punishment for his incompetence. Meanwhile, she brought in the finest and most discreet physicians money could buy and ordered them to repair this Commonwealth relic.

As far as tormenting Beka went, the death of her lover would delight the Merovege to no end, and it would be especially fitting in light of Ignatius Valentine's disgusting crime and his daughter complicity. From time to time, the Merovege indulged herself in imagining the agony Beka would suffer, the guilt that would well up like a geyser within her, corrosive and unstoppable. But she did not cherish that beautiful vision very long, for she knew that she would be inviting the wrath of fledgling Systems Commonwealth upon her head. Most of those pathetic worlds she could bribe, ignore, or threaten into peace, but the fury of the flagship, as well as the captain's pet Nietzschean, seriously concerned her. A little ransom and torture was one thing, hardly novel for political figures, but murder, particular one caught on a recording...

If she observed him very closely, the Merovege could just barely discern the minute rise and fall of his chest. An ugly, livid bruise inflamed his neck, contrasting sharply with his ashen pallor. If he lived, he would make a lovely gift for Beka, just before the Merovege snatched her, the intended prize. And then... she allowed herself a moment to daydream. When she was finished with Beka, not even the chivalrous Dylan Hunt would want her back. As a young girl, the Merovege had suffered the sudden, tragic loss of everyone she loved, but she had an even harsher fate in mind for Beka Valentine. She would know the same loss but also the agony of knowing that her lover was alive and well... and wanted nothing to do with her. No one would, ever again.

-o-

'Tense' did not begin to describe it. Beka had experienced disagreements with crewmates before, even got into shouting matches with them, but this was new to her. Tyr was being _careful_ with her, and to her amazement, she found herself being careful back. Their voices never rose above a polite murmur, and they constantly maintained an arms-length distance between each other. In the long term, Beka was sure it would drive her crazy, but she had so many other things on her mind that she accepted the situation and did her best to keep relations civil.

After a few days of inquiry, of research, and of secret rendez-vous with a startling range of characters, the tense politeness started to wear on her, a minor yet persistent stress added to her life. She couldn't think how to break it, though. Not even hiding the Maru had managed to dent the icy coat of civility that enshrouded their conversations. Beka felt bereft when they left the cold moon in a slightly less battered courier ship, but one look at Tyr's inscrutable dark eyes banished any ideas she might have had about sharing her distress. As far as he was concerned, this was just another mission. He had buried his emotions so far down that Beka wondered if their friendship would ever be the same.

"She has been hiring half a dozen very expensive, very discreet physicians since approximately the date you received the most recent transmission," he informed her after one of his secretive expeditions.

Beka paled and suddenly felt cold. "Then she really _is_ worried." In spite of the reserve that had built up between them, and much to her embarrassment, tears began sliding silently down her cheeks. "We can't wait any longer. We've both seen Trance work medical miracles, and Andromeda must have better medical facilities than some criminal." She fought to keep her voice level and her arguments rational, even as her vision blurred and her throat closed up.

"Criminal elements often possess medical facilities to rival the best hospitals because they cannot allow themselves the exposure of leaving their strongholds." A spark of compassion flared briefly behind that stoic mask he wore, and he sighed. "But on the whole, I concur. She will be preparing for the scheduled exchange, and if we are to entertain any possibility of rescuing Dylan, it must be on our terms."

Beka's eyes widened in incredulous relief. "You do?" She hastily wiped her face with her sleeve. "Then what are you waiting for? What's the plan?"

A trace of the old familiar grin ghosted across Tyr's face. "You are going to break into a fortress more heavily defended that the Vedran Empress's bedroom, drag out your critically wounded lover, and flee to a ship which I suspect will strongly desire to shoot you on sight."

"Me? What are you going to be doing, the crossword puzzle in _Soldier of Fortune_?"*

An amber flame glinted behind Tyr's eyes. "I shall provide the distraction."

-o-

An emergency message from Security raised a cacophony of flashing lights in the VR matrix where the Merovege was laying the groundwork for a profitable little excursion into an ancient Than treasury. Her head rang at the eye-searing alarm, and it was with a pounding headache that she strode to the intel wing, where her people had already secured a private channel with the one of her operatives.

Maintaining her girlish exterior took most of the Merovege's self-control, slipping in the fact of her throbbing migraine. When the ashen woman onscreen announced that they had just not tracked Tyr Anasazi, after they had assured her that he'd returned to the Andromeda, she slammed her hands on the console with a string of curses and startled the entire room into silence. That only fanned her anger, but instead of undermining her image any further, she gritted her teeth and let the operative continue.

"He's getting too close," the woman panted. "He's been making inquiries that I predict will lead him here three to four days from now."

"The day before the rendez-vous," the Merovege hissed. "So he means to grace us with his presence a day early." Her breath slowed as she considered the news. "Are you certain this time? Shall I receive another dispatch tomorrow that he is on my doorstep?"

The transmission flickered and cut abruptly to black. Instead of the familiar face of her operative, a darkly handsome visage of somebody she'd never met yet instantly recognized appeared, grinning.

"Rest assured, Madame, you will receive no such dispatch."

Then he too disappeared, leaving the Merovege to turn, snarling, on the nearest intel agent. "Trace. That. Signal," she spat. "Find out where Nalia is."

He nodded wordlessly as he bent over his console, pale as a ghost. And well he should be petrified; if anything concerning the captive exchange went awry, she would have this entire division discharged with extreme prejudice.

"Merovege," he whispered a moment later, "I have another message for you. From IS." Internal security. This could not be good news. She grabbed his arm, digging her manicured nails into his flesh as she leaned over to see the monitor more clearly.

"At the most recent shift change, over a dozen of our guards failed to report in. We just found them moments ago, bound and strapped with explosives. Whoever did this underestimated us," he said with the tiniest hint of pride amid his fear. "We still have seven minutes before the bombs explode. We... we should have them deactivated by then, but as a safety precaution, I strong advise you to wait in my office until I contact you again. I've grounded all courier and delivery ships until we find out who's behind this attack," Her head of internal security vanished from the screen, but this time only because the pre-recorded message had ended.

She released the agent next to her wit ha glare and took off swiftly for IS headquarters. It was probably the safest room in the whole complex, even moreso than the lower basement cells. As she hurried from wing to wing, she turned the situation over and over in her head; something was not right.

IS had spoken of the shift change as if all the guards changed places at the same time, but she knew better and had long ago implemented staggered shifts. While she supposed that somebody as resourceful and dogged as Tyr Anasazi could have divined the schedule, she could not believe that he had arrived on-planet and remained undetected for as long as it would have taken him to capture and rig explosives on over a dozen highly-trained guards. And another thing – she had never heard of Tyr Anasazi or any of his cohorts underestimating any enemy so severely.

Her heels clicked rapidly across tiled floors as her thoughts raced. Might Tyr or his operators be planetside now, perhaps in one of the grounded ships? IS would know to hold them until all could be searched, but that seven minutes – now four – would give an experienced saboteur sufficient time to smuggle away somewhere safe.

She slipped into IS headquarters with two minutes to spare. Agitated, she paced across the spacious office and waited, by turns frightened and wrathful. Anasazi was handling this very skillfully, she had to admit. She and IS would be too busy trying not to panic about the bombs that he would have as near to free rein as he could hope for, to do whatever he wished. There was something more to this than a half-hearted bomb threat, she was sure, but until she received the all-clear from IS, she could do nothing to investigate or counter the attack.

The clock on the computer display flicked to the next minute. Nothing happened. The Merovege let out a deep breath and tried to calm her frantically beating heart and chaotic, frenzied thoughts. By the time IS contacted her, she was almost back to her normal cool and controlled self, dispassionately considering what Anasazi's real scheme might be.

"I'm so glad to hear it," she replied to the news of a technician's success in defusing the bombs. "Now I want you to send a handful of your stealthiest agents to the med wing where Captain Hunt is resting."

As soon as they signed off, the Merovege slipped off her heeled shoes, after assuring herself that nobody could see her, and pelted toward the medical area. She had figured it out as the head of IS had spoken to her, relating the nature of the bomb and the circumstances under which the guards were found. They had assured her that this was a warning shot, fired across their proverbial bow before Anasazi's anticipated arrival, and the Merovege knew enough about the Nietzschean's reputation to know that he would never be so easily outguessed. So far, he had made a laughingstock of her intel and security people. She would not allow him to make _her_ ridiculous as well.

Because she was closer that anyone else to the medical wing – and unencumbered by the arms her security forces bore – she slid ungracefully into the soothing white-tiled area ahead of her people and startled Captain Hunt's unauthorized visitor. Beka was injecting him with a hypospray and, in an amazing feat of strength, he was already coming awake and unsteadily pushing himself to his feet. She had a gun trained on the Merovege as soon as she rounded the corner, shoes still in hand.

"Move and I'll shoot," Beka warned in a flat monotone.

The Merovege let her shoes clatter to the floor as she raised her hands above her head in the age-old sign of surrender. She smiled. "That's such a cliché, Beka. Can't you do any better than that? 'Move and I'll shoot'?"

"I wasn't planning on killing you, but I can't say it wouldn't give be a lot of fun," Beka snarled. She spared a glance for Dylan, and the Merovege delighted in the agonized expression on her face. "Dylan, can you make? I think I can get us out of here, but only if you can walk on your own."

Pale with exertion and pain he failed to mask completely, he leaned against the wall as Beka advanced toward the Merovege, jaw clenched hard in fury. She could guess what was coming next, and the joy it gave her made her smile beautiful, even angelic. "I'll give you no trouble, Captain Valentine, I swear. Your lover will escape safely on your ship."

"Shut up," Beka hissed. She rammed the barrel of her gun into the Merovege's throat and wrapped her free arm around her shoulders. Just then, the soldiers appeared around the same corridor, heavy arms trained on Beka and Dylan.

The Merovege laughed breathily, voice tinkling like a wind chime. "Hold your fire. I am quite definitely taken, so we shall escort our guests to their ship. No, shhh, don't argue with me. We're just exchanging one prize for another. A better one." The gun pressed harder into her windpipe, nearly choking off her air supply, but she had never felt more confident.

"Beka, you can't do this," Dylan rasped from his place on the wall. "You'll be giving her exactly what she wants."

The Merovege ignored him. "You can do this," she whispered. "It's exactly what you want." She wished she could look into the other woman's eyes, but she had no doubt that Beka would kill her if she made any unexpected moves. She felt the rapid heaving of Beka's lungs and a moment later, felt a minute relaxation in her muscles.

"Okay," she muttered. "We'll make the exchange."

*Yes, _Soldier of Fortune_ does exist in the post-Fall era. Fun Fact: it is the only 20th century Earth publication to not only survive but also expand its circulation to several billion readers with thousands of new readers per year. Take that, Cosmo.


	9. Chapter 9

Hey , you're caught up with the posted chapters! Now I have to get to writing more, eek!

**Chapter Nine**

The world tilted and spun underfoot as a wave of horror washed over him. Terror and his own physical fragility nearly brought him to his knees as he fought to remain conscious. This lone human woman would not defeat him, not where hordes of Magog and Nietzscheans had history itself had failed to destroy him. Beka... he would fight as passionately, as single-mindedly for her as he'd ever fought for the Systems Commonwealth, and with that thought, he pulled himself back to standing.

"I won't leave without you," he rasped. Beka's blue eyes locked onto his, and he saw that she was just as determined to save him as he was to save her. Just as Sara had been.... when he he ever done so much good to deserve the incredibly powerful love of two such amazing women? No, he could not let his mind wander right now.

Her voice was ragged but strong when she replied. "Go. You need to get to Andromeda to get better. Then you can come back for me." She attempted a smile, but her jaw was clenched tight.

He shook his head. "No, Beka, I can't. I-" His voice faltered as his head whirled. He recognized the symptoms of extreme physical distress, and a tiny part of him knew that she was right. He was no good to her in this state. In fact, that insidious voice continued, he could only hinder her, liability that he was. If he were just a little bit stronger, he could have thought of something, but as it was... His legs wobbled and buckled, but he forced himself to remain upright.

"Get in the ship," she hissed. Her eyes pleaded with him, so like yet so unlike the other woman's. The look of bliss on her sickeningly angelic face sharpened his fury. "Her people will think of something soon, and then we'll both be stuck here. Please, Dylan, don't make this all for nothing. Andromeda needs her captain, and I need you better."

Need. His heart ached at her words; she knew him so well. She knew exactly what to say, and for the briefest moment, he resented her for manipulating him, just a little. But she was right, and the knowledge tore at him worse than any of the many pains that racked his body. Finally, reluctantly, he nodded.

"I'll come back for you, Beka, I swear."

She gave him a shaky grin. "Damn straight you will."

With one last glance at her through blurred eyes, he climbed into the courier ship she had indicated. She watched him go, keeping her arm tight around the Merovege and the gun close at her throat. Quicker than he would have thought, her people cleared him to leave, and a moment later, a message appeared on the viewscreen. He squinted, though there was no mistaking his weapons officer.

"Congratulations," he rumbled. "If you're hearing this, I assume that all went according to plan and this is our victorious Captain, risen from the dead, whom I am addressing. You've made it out of weapons range At the end of this message are coordinates that will lead you to my location. I fear that Beka had to remain behind, as she insisted." He bared his teeth in what Dylan assumed he meant to be a grin. It made him shiver. "When you and I meet again, sir, we shall discuss the downfall of this doomed Merovingian empire."

-o-

"There, you see? He is safe." The cool confidence of the Merovege's voice grated on Beka's nerves. How could anyone be so calm with a gun at her throat? _She knows she's won_, she thought. That was how.

"I have no way of knowing that this display isn't rigged," Beka muttered, but she realized that there was nothing she could do about it now.

"That's true," the Merovege cooed, "but you'll just have to hope to escape and find out for yourself." She turned slightly and snapped her fingers at her nervously waiting guards. "Do it."

Beka whipped around, but it was too late. As if they'd just been humoring her until now, the security guards disarmed and restrained her in a few whirlwind seconds. "So now you've got me. What next, we drink herbal tea and gossip about boys?"

One of the guards advanced toward her with an all-too-familiar dropper and bottle. She struggled against the arms holding her, but they were too many and too strong. A gut-wrenching sense of deja-vu swept over her as tears sprang to her eyes and she finally understood Clothilde's plan for revenge.

"No!" she screamed, "Don't do this! I won't let you do this to me!"

The Merovege giggled. "That's okay. I don't need your permission."

The dropper loomed larger and larger, and try as she might, she could not ear her eyes away from the milky white liquid that sloshed in the bottle. A squeeze, a drop, and the world exploded.

-o-

Underneath the smile that she wore plastered to her face, the Merovege felt a twinge of worry. Beka's crewmates would be plotting a rescue mission as soon as Captain Hunt was recovered enough to make himself difficult, and she could not trust a Flash-crazed maniac in anything less secure than the dungeon cells. She would have to immediately begin preparations to fortify the compound against any sort of attack or subterfuge the Andromeda's crew might scheme up.

At least things were progressing nicely on the most important front. Just one look at Beka, strapped into a chair and thrashing violently, was enough to banish her concerns. Her long had she dreamed of this moment, slapping Beka Valentine in chains and tormenting her with her deepest fears? Decades, now. Every terrified, manic glint of her blue eyes was everything that the Merovege could have imagined, and picturing the state she would eventually leave Beka in made her smile.

She walked closer and cocked her head, curious to see up close the effects of the drug cocktail on Beka. In their search for the perfect interrogation drug for another Valentine, the Merovege's chemists had tried over a dozen drug combinations and meticulously recorded their effects. This particular cocktail consisted of Flash, which was the carrier substance, synthesized Nietzschean hormones, and a hallucinogenic derived from a common fungus that plagued grain harvests across the Known Worlds. The Nietzschean hormones were close enough to human physiology that they affected humans predictably and near-universally by amping up levels of aggression and fight-or-flight response to a state of almost – but not quite, because the hormones could be very specifically calibrated – unbearable physical stimulation, and the hallucinogenic compound gave the drugged individual a surreal view of the world that ensured that their brains could not function properly to create and effectuate an escape attempt.

When this cocktail had proven useless for interrogating Rafael Valentine, they had then sought to tranquilize him with one of the simplest and most freely available sedatives in the Known Worlds – alcohol. It had worked surprisingly quickly to calm him and restore him to a calmer, if not especially rational, state. Of course, he was then drunk and still useless for questioning, but the Merovege had realized then that this potent combination would be perfect for her plan. Beka Valentine would be addicted to the rush of the uppers as well as the calming effect of the downer, and the hallucinogens would destroy her mind in the process.

When Beka's wild eyes landed on the Merovege, she shrieked. The sound made the Merovege's hair stand on end, but she smiled despite the goosebumps that raised on her flesh. Beka's flesh was flushed an unhealthy brick red as her blood raced through her veins and arteries, and drops of red appeared on her palms and her lips where her fingernails and teeth, respectively, had torn into her flesh for want of something, anything, to do. Her blond hair lay ragged on her shoulders, plastered to her skull with sweat, and she wheezed as she fought her restraints like a wild thing.

"Beka," the Merovege called sweetly, "how are you feeling?"

"Shit!" she cried in response. "Shit! What have you done- shit!" Her cursing soon devolved again into wordless screams which would have been absolutely terrifying if she were not anchored down with enough reinforced titanium to restrain a small starship.

"I have something that might help you feel better," the Merovege said as she lifted a bottle of very hard, very rough liquor from the floor. She had ordered her people to find the worst alcohol they could, and for once, they had not disappointed. With a graceful twist, she spun the lid from the bottle and sniffed it. It made her eyes water.

Beka's eyes stilled for a moment as she focused on the bottle. "Sh*t," she whimpered. "No, I won't... sh*t. No." The Merovege knew better than to come a step closer, so she drew the bottle back and then tossed some of the burning liquid into Beka's flushed, sweaty face. She closed her eyes in time to avoid the worst of it, but a good ounce or two made it into her mouth, and so thirsty was she that she swallowed by instinct. Her eyes popped open again when she tasted it, and that shriek echoed again throughout the concrete chamber.

"I hope you like your medicine. If you want more, all you have to do is ask."

More cursing and shouting met her suggestion, but the Merovege settled back into a more comfortable chair to watch and smile. Beka would not take her medicine now, but long before Captain Hunt arrived with his crew, she'd be begging for it.


	10. Chapter 10

**B.L.A the Mouse**: Thanks as always for your kind words – I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed my footnote! More tormenting is to follow!

**Chapter Ten**

It was not the battle of wills that the Merovege found so pleasurable about her time with Beka. She doubted that any human being could have withstood this chemical assault; certainly she herself could not. She never for a moment feared that Beka would successfully resist her for long, and the fun of it was not the prospect of beating Beka in such an unfair fight. While she enjoyed wondering what it must feel like for Beka, it was not even the physical pain she was inducing that thrilled the Merovege every time she went to visit her guest.

No, it was those shining moments of clarity that delighted her, that lit up her soul like a burst of sunshine through roiling storm clouds. The Merovege had programmed the security in her cell to tighten every time her heart and respiration rates hovered within a certain range – between manic and tranquilized – because it was then that she was coming back to herself. The restraints automatically pulled closer, another shielded door slid down at the single entrance, and the slightest unusual motion from Beka would set off a top-priority alarm. Her physicians could not attend Beka at these times; only the Merovege could bypass the security via a complicated process. It was not practical to implement the measures round the clock, but she only worried about Beka slipping out of her grasp during these moments of clarity. And for most of those times, the Merovege watched Beka in blissful, but armed, contemplation.

Just three days after Beka's capture – neither the Merovege nor the Andromeda had even pretended to try to make the scheduled rendez-vous – the Merovege walked into Beka's cell to find her shrieking. The sound of Beka's screams raised a primal adrenaline rush for the Merovege, but she ignored the slightly queasy feeling in her stomach and the horrible hoarseness of Beka's voice that itched at her own throat. She was screaming about her current hallucination, something involving a glowing white man and a cage, but as the Merovege watched, the quality of her screams changed.

"You can stop this!" she shrieked. "You did this! That man, that cage... you put them there!" Tears started rolling down her cheeks, and her screams became sobs. "You did this to me, you hateful bitch. I can't escape them, I can't escape any of it. You're killing me. I can feel it, you're killing me. You're tearing me apart. Everything I see, all the pain, all the... everything, you're behind it!" Her face was turning purple as she thrashed. "Get me out of here! Get me out of here! You BITCH, get me out of here!"

When her words trailed off for a moment and she gave into her sobs, the Merovege spoke up. "I can help you feel better," she said quietly.

Beka's head shot up to regard her. Her eyes were wide with hope for a fraction of a second before she jerked her head from side to side. "No, no, no, not that. I can't ever... you're turning me into a monster, but I won't help you. I have to fight it. I have to fight you! I won't let you!"

That fraction of a second made the Merovege's day. "Oh Beka, can't you see that I've already won? You're addicted to my little cocktail, you know. Tell me, does it hurt more when you're high or more when you're coming down?"

Beka's eyes, which had gazed at her so fiercely a moment before, dropped, and the Merovege allowed herself a wide smile. "There," she cooed. "You see? It can't get any worse. Whether you ask for the bottle or I force it down your throat with a funnel, we both know it's the only time you'll be free of the pain and the hallucinations. Am I wrong, Beka? Can you tell me I'm wrong?"

The battle of the wills was pleasurable, but far sweeter was the agonized look in Beka's blue eyes when she dragged them reluctantly to meet the Merovege's gaze. "No," she wheezed. "I mean... I don't know. I don't know what you've done to me. But I have to fight it. As long as I fight it, there's hope."

A genuine burst of laughter bubbled from the Merovege's lips. "Hope, Beka?" She considered. "We might as well be honest with one another. Yes, Beka, today there is hope. Perhaps if your knight in shining armor were to swoop in at this very moment, recovery from your addiction would not kill you or destroy what few functioning neurons you have left. But what about tomorrow? Next week? Oh, I have no doubt that Captain Hunt will return for you, but how long do you think he will require to formulate a plan to infiltrate my defenses? Will there be hope then?"

She lowered her voice and leaned forward. "It's your turn to be honest, Captain Valentine. Do you truly think he'll want you when he finds you? You've been down this road before, and it nearly destroyed his ship. Could he ever trust a Flash addict again? Put yourself in his shoes. Could _you_ trust you again?"

This time, Beka held her gaze. "He's not like that," she finally whispered. "He's better than me. He... he wouldn't have hurt you like I did."

The Merovege hissed as if she had touched a hot engine. "No, perhaps not," she snapped. "Tell me, do you truly believe that a man like that will keep giving chances to space trash like you? He may be a knight, Beka, but he's not a saint." She sensed that she was losing the thread of the discussion and so leaned back in her chair to watch Beka.

"He'll come for me," she murmured, still shivering uncontrollably. "He still loves me." She glanced up at the Merovege, perhaps for argument, but the Merovege just sat smiling at her. If conversation failed, she thought, she would try silence instead. People generally hated being watched in their most vulnerable moments, and being strapped to a chair while coming down from the effects of a hallucinogenic narcotic cocktail while raving about a rescue that might never come would qualify for most people as a very vulnerable moment.

Beka dropped her eyes again and started muttering to herself things that the Merovege could not hear. Most of the interesting part had come and gone, and now the Merovege had to dose Beka once more. She rose from her chair to collect the little vial and to press the controls that tilted Beka's seat backward and secured her head facing forward. Beka shook herself from her murmurs long enough to issue one more shrill cry before the Merovege pulled back her eyelids and dropped in the cocktail in a few swift movements.

This was her other favorite part. For half a second before the drug hit, Beka knew exactly what was coming. This close, the Merovege could read the emotions that flitted across her haggard, shadowed face – the horror, the rage, and the tiniest flicker of happiness that the high was coming back. She bared her teeth at the Merovege, but a moment later, the drug touched off the first of many chemical reactions in her brain, and she was lost to the world again.

-o-

The Flash traveled through her veins quicker than the other chemicals, and for an entire sweet, ecstatic, and horrifying minute, Beka reveled in the sharpness of her mind, the awareness of every nerve of her body, and the strength and speed of her limbs as she thrashed in her bindings. During this minute, she assessed her situation with a blinding clarity, and she was sure that with just five consecutive minutes of that feeling, she could have plotted an escape. She could feel the weaker points of the restraints and throw her desperate muscles against them, and she recalled every detail of her capture and the security that held her here as if seeing it played on a larger than life video screen.

_It has to be now_, she thought. _When they think I'm insane. This minute. _But it took too long for her to remember where she was, too many precious seconds while she let the joy of her moment of sanity wash over her, and by the time she was alert and planning, she had less than half her moment left. Thirty seconds, a clock in her head warned her.

_No guards outside. Clothilde doesn't trust human security, not after Tyr_. Twenty-five seconds. _She thinks the computer can handle security better than any of her people. Restraints adjust to my vitals, tighten when I'm coming down, loosen when I'm very high and very low. They think I'm crazy that whole time, but I have my minute. My minute. _Fifteen seconds. _Need to disrupt the computer. Need what, need codes? Need tools? Need something, anything. From physicians, from Clothilde? She trusts herself to be secure, nobody else. Checks physicians. Checks herself? _Three seconds. Damn. _Saw some of her automated security when I broke in. Think, what do I – _

And nothing. The hallucinogenic hit, and a moment later, the Nietzschean hormones caught up. The glowing man smirked at her from a corner of the room hung with shimmering white shadows. She screamed as he crossed the weirdly tilting room in great, eye-blurring strides. He was coming for her. He had come for her father, for the pilots she had known growing up, and now he was coming for her with his white cage.

His burning hand squeezed around her wrist. His white cage laughed at her with teeth that dripped her father's blood. The glowing man told her terrible things about her mother and her father, about Clothilde, about her, and about Dylan. The room melted like candle wax, and nightmarish visions danced in the corners of her eyes, but still the glowing man remained. The white cage laughed and gnashed her ankles.

Her world was pain. Her world was terror. Eternity, dripping with her father's heartsblood, stretched out before her as the laughing cage closed its jaws around her with agonizing slowness. She tried to run, but always the glowing man blocked her escape. He whispered. She screamed. Her heart burst out of her chest, but still her chest pounded and her throat seared. She was drowning in the blood that dripped from the cage.

Every drop raked like coals across her flesh.

His horrible, glowing eyes.

The cage laughed as she screamed.

Growing larger and larger were his eyes, his glowing, his...

Blue?

The glowing man slipped off to one side, grinning at her and wagging his finger. The room stabilized as two pinpoints of blue broke the cages of the bar, following by a golden cloud and...

Beka moaned. Clothilde had returned once again to gloat at Beka's pain, to flaunt her own free movement, to lure Beka deeper into the chemical darkness. She had been pushed this far, and she knew that if she took a step of her own free will, she would fall over the precipice. But every time Clothilde came to offer that shining bottle, that beckoning tranquility with a smell like rotting grain and gasoline, the drugs had eaten away a little more of her sanity. Sometimes she fancied that she could see glittering plumes of her sanity drift around her head, dissipating into a vent she felt but could not see. It reminded her of a sight that always made her stomach clench, even in holonovels – the telltale leak of oxygen from a spacebound vehicle.

The words were not penetrating just yet, but the gist of it was clear enough. Those blue eyes, so like and so unlike her mother's, danced as that unlabeled bottle wiggled at the edge of her vision. She shook her head, but she noticed that as her heart slowed and approached something like its normal resting rate, the glowing man grew smaller and smaller. The blood had disappeared from his white cage. That was the worst part; she guessed that if she did take the bottle, the glowing man and his laughing cage would disappear altogether. Maybe the hallucinogenic was impeded by the depressing effect of the alcohol. She would have given almost anything to know for sure.

"Oh, I promise you I know."

Beka's head jerked up of its own accord. She had not realized that she had spoken aloud. "You can't," she mumbled. Her tongue felt like a velvet-dipped brick. "Can't know. This is new, you told me."

Her girlish laugh hurt Beka's head. "Captain Valentine, you wound me. I would never deceive you! Yes, this cocktail is new, and you'll be interested to know that it was tailored to a Valentine... just not you."

Her brain rushed and puttered like a broken watch, but a memory surfaced just then. Rafe. Clothilde had tortured and drugged Rafe. With this? Yes... no, the rest of the memory eluded her. It seemed likely. "Rafe. You put him through this. That's why he..." She shook her head. "Did he even know what he was doing?"

Clothilde shrugged. "You know, I cannot decide if it would please me more if he did know and despised himself for it or if he was lost in a nightmarish world of my creation." She tapped her lips, then smiled. "I'll leave it up to you. I will tell you this, Beka: your brother did not last long. Perhaps he did not cherish your aversion to chemical psycho-alteration, but his alacrity in choosing the bottle amazed even me. Another hour, another day, another week – what do you think it matters to me? I can wait, Beka. I have waited a very long time."

The hallucinogenic lingered in the corners of her mind enough to sketch her a timeline, hovering just above Clothilde's head, that showed Beka just how long she had waited. Her stomach heaved and she lurched so hard that the delicate skin of her wrists and ankles tore against the restraints. Yes, Clothilde could wait. She could re-shape her entire persona, her life's goals, even her identity but cherish this deadly vendetta in the darkest depths of her heart.

So it came down to this. Clothilde's hovering timeline versus Dylan and his glorious warship. "No," she rasped, "I have to wait for him. I'll be here when he comes. Me, not... that."

Clothilde cocked her head and watched Beka for a silent moment. Then she picked up the bottle of clear liquid and unscrewed the lid. That rotting grain gasoline smell flooded the room and made Beka's eyes water. The glowing man shrunk into a dot in the corner of her vision, and the laughing cage vanished in the blink of her eye. It was working. Just the smell of the stuff had banished the glowing man. She let out a sigh of relief, and a moment later wished fervently that she had not.

"I know it's childish of me," Clothilde cooed, "but I told you so. Answer me this, Beka. If Captain Hunt comes for you, do you want your visions haunting you? Would you recognize him if he did come, or would you bite his hand when he tried to touch you?" She waved the bottle under Beka's nose, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "You could live with a dependency. Could you live if you hurt him like that?"

Tears leaked from Beka's eyes. Damn her. Damn the bitch to the fieriest, or the iciest, or whatever agony and horrors awaited monsters like her. She was right. The mockery, the temptation she could handle because she had fought against these things all her life, but the plain and simple truth... that was what had brought her to Dylan in the first place, the truth of his vision. Now Clothilde was presenting another vision, and Beka could not deny what she said. A life with an addiction, or two, or three, or a life blasted by betrayal? She knew what Dylan would say, that she needed to hold onto herself, but for the first time, she did not know what that meant.

She thought about Tyr, about their kiss, and her battered heart made her decision. "Yes," she breathed. She had betrayed Dylan once already, and no matter what hell she might put her own body through, she could not do that again. Clothilde was right; when he rescued her, it would probably be during one of her paranoid hallucinations, and it tore at her soul to think that that of what she might do to him if she were freed of her bonds. "Yes."

-o-

The battle of the wills had been highly enjoyable, the Merovege decided. Yes, that would be a pleasure to remember time and again, to savor in the palace of her memory. Those shining tears tracking down that dirty, smudged face. That slump to her shoulders that the Merovege had never seen, not even during Beka's uneasy slumber. That spark of coherence in her eyes, followed by a profound dimness. Yes, it had been sweet, but what followed was even sweeter.

True, the alcohol did give Beka some temporary relief from the pains of her hallucinations and the hypersensitivity of her nerves induced by the Nietzschean hormones and the Flash. But the eager tilt of her head, the shame and terrible knowledge in her eyes when the Merovege came into her cell now, clinking the bottle with her fingernails, thrilled her like nothing she had ever experienced. For as long as she lived, Beka would remember the ringing sound of her fingernail on glass, and her blood would quicken at the thought of the relief that would soon follow. And when she had drunk herself into queasy tranquility, the sickness that racked her body upon awakening could only be cleared by another kind of cocktail. It was a surprisingly useful effect of the Nietzschean hormone; it fought back the tide of the worst hangover even as it cleared the way for the hallucinogenic.

Beka's words remained as venomous as ever, but the Merovege saw the joyful anticipation, smothered ruthlessly in half a second, that animated Beka's bound limbs when the door admitted her. They both knew that Beka was ruined, that a single word had sent her flying into a downward spiraling chasm from which she could never emerge. The Merovege was fairly sure that Captain Hunt would arrive with his great ship before long, but her task was complete. Now all she had to do was to relish the fruits of her labor, to cement her enemy's addictions, and to dream of the happiness that Beka would never know again. That terrible clarity in Beka's eyes would diminish but never die, no matter how desperately she would search in a vial of hormone and a bottle of alcohol. And search she would.


	11. Chapter 11

**ilexx** – She would never agree with you, but then, she doesn't know our heroes nearly as well as she think she does.

**Chapter 11**

The glowing man was wailing, and the his eyes flashed red sparks at her. Beka cringed away and tried to curl up, tried begging him to be quiet, but he just kept wailing, an inhuman cry of pain and alarm. Nobody came with a bottle to dampen the shrieks of the glowing man, but eventually the nightmare receded, as it alwayss did. But this time, though the impossible visions hid in the corners of her mind, invisible for now, the wailing and the flashing lights continued to harass her ears and eyes.

Slowly Beka clawed her way back to consciousness, groggy and weak with the pain of the agonizing stimulus. A new torture Clothilde had devised for her? No, Beka recognized that noise. It was a klaxon, and the red flashes were an alert. Clothilde's base was under attack. Beka's heart lifted, then plummeted half a second later, and tears leaked from her eyes. If it was Dylan – and who else would it be? - he was going to find her here, like_ this_. A strung-out sobbing mess, addicted to chemicals she could not even pronounce. What if she didn't recognize him, the man she loved? Worse, what if he didn't recognize the woman he loved in her?

Just then, a young doctor burst into the cell, with the loved and hated equipment. Something about him struck Beka was unusual, but she could not place it. He had shaggy red hair, a white goat, thin glasses, and an air of panic.

"Merovege's orders," he mumbled. "If he's gonna find you, he's gonna find you as bad as she can make you." Beka's heart sank even further, and despite her weak struggles, he had subdued her and dosed her within a few minutes.

Beka's head cleared, not the jagged lightning clarity of flash, but the bright-eyed alertness she associated with a good cup of coffee. The reason for the odd change in her condition hit her as the doctor hurried over to the stainless steel counter where the medical team kept the drugs and a few medical items – he had not dried her eyes before administering the drug, and her tears had washed most of it away. Her heart raced; he was going to give her another dose after he dabbed her eyes, which meant she had a bit more than he usual minute _and_ an amateur to work on. Surely she could think of...

There. The glasses. She pretended to struggle again as he roughly wiped her eyes with gauze, while she calculated how she could snap off a piece of the frame, the temple arm, and free herself. The dose came, and the flash hit her brain, but unlike every other futile minute of awareness she'd had on the drug, this time she was ready.

Sixty seconds. She thrashed and caught his coat. Fifty three, she yanked him down hard enough that he tumbled and smacked his chin on her skull. Ow. The impact knocked his glasses loose, but Beka's hand shot out to catch them before she had thought about it. She gripped his coat as she snapped the temple arm from the frame. Forty seven seconds. As he flailed at her, she shoved him toward the floor, released his coat, and wrapped her fingers in his hair.

"How much give do you think I could get out of these restraints?" she snarled. "How far would I be willing to hurt myself for the satisfaction of stabbing your eye out with your own glasses?"

He yelped and struggled to free himself, but her flash-enhanced strength and reflexes held him steady in her grasp. "I'm not the one who ordered this!" he yelled. "I can't – ow! Please, please, oh please don't hurt me!"

Thirty seconds. "Get me out of this chair, or I swear I will do my best to kill you. I know you have the codes, they all do. My patience is beyond thin."

To prove her point, she jabbed his cheek with the broken temple arm. His flesh tore and reddened under the sharp metal bits, and he shrieked. "Next time I won't miss. And don't bother asking me to let you up. I'm sure you can reach the keypad if you're really determined."

His fingers scrabbled at the restraints, at the tiny keypad beneath the arm of the chair. He muttered something, and the ankle cuffs sprang free. Eighteen seconds. He couldn't know about the minute, could he? "There!" he cried. The wrist cuffs sprang open, and Beka leaped to her feet.

"Door," she hissed. "I won't follow you, but I have to get out of here." She tossed him toward the door, that drab rectangle that had defined the contours of her life for so long now. Nine seconds. He fumbled at the door and sprinted out so quickly that he smacked his shoulder on it. Beka noticed that he had left out the vial and, hating herself for it and for what she had just done, she swiped it from the counter and dashed out of the cell.

The klaxon drilled into her skull, every wail a white-hot blow that shattered her eardrums. When she had three seconds left in her minute, she tilted her head backwards and dosed herself again, this time with twice the drug that the doctors had used on her. Oh, she would pay for this dose with every screaming nerve fiber and every nightmare her fried neurons could create, but freedom was worth all of it. Freedom not only from Clothilde's fury but from Dylan too, though that freedom would ache even more than the consequences of the drug. He could never love her like this; better he remember the woman she'd been in the hotel room.

The flash hit her brain at the same time as the Nietzschean hormones and the hallucinogen. She stumbled as she was wracked with spasms, but it had been so long since she had last eaten than she could not throw up anything but a thin, burning stream of bile tinged pink. She spit, wiped her mouth, and ran. The flash and the Nietzschean hormone kept her running toward the hangar, according to the plan that some part of her brain had retained when she had studied the layout of this place with Tyr, even as terrifying visions of the glowing man and his biting, laughing cage pursued her.

As she fled the fortress, she heard his voice. "Beka!" he cried as she ran past a corridor. She willed her hair black and kept running. He knew about the nanobots in her hair, but if he didn't recognize her, maybe he wouldn't chase her. He didn't deserve any of what had happened to him, and he certainly didn't deserve to be saddled by his own sense of honor with a brain-damaged, drug-addicted girlfriend and First Officer.

The sound of pounding footsteps behind her spurred Beka, and she reached the hangar before he could stop her. Still the visions swarmed her, worse than ever, but the high dose of Flash had cleared a tiny window before her eyes where she could see into the real world. Clothilde's people had evacuated, but they not bothered to lock the door behind them, leaving her with a dilapidated supply ship, almost as ugly as her beautiful Maru, tucked away in a corner. She forced her way inside the ship and hijacked the controls just in time to see Dylan burst into the hangar.

"Beka!" he shouted. She tried not to hear the quaver in his voice. "What are you doing, it's me! It's Dylan!" He banged his fists on the hull as Beka powered up the ship. When that failed, he dashed around to the cockpit and waved his arms up at Beka. "Beka, you have to stop! Please, I'm here! You're safe!"

She wished that it were true, wished so hard that she shook with longing. Thanks to Clothilde, she wasn't safe now and might never be again. And if she went with Dylan, he wouldn't be safe either. The airlock hissed open to admit the little ship, and, weeping, Beka fired the ship's defensive lasers to warn Dylan off from trying to follow her into the airlock in a last-ditch effort to force her to leave with him. It was exactly the kind of thing he would do. He jumped back by instinct, and before Beka shot away from Clothilde's base, she caught on the viewscreen one last glance of the shock and hurt that crumpled his handsome face. She reached out a hand to touch the image, though she could barely see it amid the nightmares that would have set her screaming into the nearest dark corner if she were not so desperate to leave.

He was gone. That life was gone. Without any idea of her destination, Beka entered the slipstream and let her instincts take her far away from everything and everybody she loved.

-o-

Her black hair had not fooled Dylan for an instant. The shape of her body, though she was worryingly thinner now, and the sway of her hips as she ran were as familiar to Dylan as his own face in the mirror – and more dear. The assault had gone more smoothly than he had allowed himself to hope, and none of his small crew had been injured as they had wrested control of the Merovege's base of operations. Memories of pain and despair haunted him as he searched the corridors and the cell that he remembered far too well. Finally, he had seen a lone woman fleeing through the compound, and he knew immediately, before he noticed anything about her, that it was Beka. He could feel her finally close after agonizing weeks apart.

At first he could not understand why she ran from him, but it occurred to him that the Merovege might have tortured and drugged her the way she had tortured Dylan and drugged Rafe. A flash of hate rushed through his blood at the idea, but he shoved that to the back of his mind. If Beka was not responding to him, maybe she did not recognize him. She was not so confused that she could hotwire the ship, however, and her aim in firing that warning shot had been so perfect that he could not believe that she was out of her mind.

He had to conclude, then, that Beka knew what she was doing, and that knowledge burned into his brain as he returned to the Andromeda in a slipfighter. When he climbed out of the tiny ship into the hangar, his crew was gathered to welcome him home, but despite their words of relief at seeing him alive, he could read disappointment in all of them. Even Rommie looked a bit crestfallen, though she had always been uneasy with the romance between her captain and first officer. And why would she not be sad – she had been programmed to feel the same 'no comrade left behind' loyalty that all good officers felt, and besides, she and Beka had become friends.

Trance hovered around him, still concerned for his health after his torture at the hands of the Merovege. "Dylan, will you please come to Medical today? You're getting better, but you're not there yet." She offered him a small smile, and the genuine kindness in her velvety brown eyes warmed him. "Beka knows you did her best, and she knows that you love her. You'll get her back." He couldn't tell if she was just comforting him or offering one of her uncanny predictions, but he found himself feeling slightly more hopeful.

"Look, I know Beka," Harper chimed in. "She does what she has to to survive, and she's the most loyal person I know. Don't give up on her, boss. You.... you mean a lot to her." Behind his smile, Dylan could hear a brittleness to his voice. Harper must have been hurting just as much as Dylan, in his own way.

Rev lay a knobbly claw on Harper's shoulder, and it was a mark of Harper's distress that he didn't flinch. "Listen to them, Dylan. You must be well in order to find Beka. Love is the greatest gift of the Divine. She knows this, and you know it. You will find each other again." It should have sounded corny, but coming from the gravelly voice of this Wayist Magog, it sounded serene.

"I've tracked all the ships leaving this system, Dylan. When you're ready, we can begin searching for Beka immediately." Rommie wasn't one for platitudes, but her voice softened a little when she continued. "She's my first officer, Dylan. I'm not going to abandon her." _Not again_, he heard in her carefully modulated tones. _Not after the Magog_.

"Thank you," he said softly. "All of you."

Tyr's features could have been carved from ice for all the emotion he showed. Though Dylan was sure that his Nietzschean principles would have kept him from forming any romantic designs on Beka, Dylan nevertheless had always picked up an impression of sparking chemistry between them. Not love, nothing to threaten him, but there was something there he was not privy to. And now, seeing Tyr so impassive when impassivity usually contained an inferno with him, Dylan knew that he had sensed correctly.

"We have the woman." His voice was quiet and taut, like a threat stretched a nanometer from its breaking point. "Shall you attend her or shall I?" He crossed his arms in front of his chest. Message received, Dylan thought.

The noble thing, the right thing, the knight's choice would have been to keep Tyr as far from the Merovege as possible on this ship, for Dylan to confront her himself to get all the information he could on Beka's condition and possible whereabouts, then turn her over to someone – who exactly? – for justice. But that would take up time he had to spend looking for Beka, and his heart told him that he could not wait a moment to find her. But if he did pursue Beka, he knew what Tyr would do, and he knew that no one else on the ship could stand up to him. Rev and perhaps Trance would try, but one look into his eyes like gemstones told Dylan that they would not succeed.

Divine, he wished he had Beka to talk to right now, but that was the problem, wasn't it? Somehow, he always knew what was right when she was around. Somehow she always led him there, even when they disagreed.

"I'll go to Medical and then I plan to leave again in less than two hours." A clamor of protest arose, but he shook his head. "That's final, people. Trance, with me. Rommie, I you to _attend_ our guest with Tyr. Harper, I need you to analyze her ship." He paused and looked at the monk, with his head bowed. Yes, Rev understood the choice Dylan had made. "Rev... pray for us. All of us."

"It never hurts to ask," he rumbled as he bowed.

They scattered. Dylan wondered when he would see them all again.


	12. Chapter 12

Author's Note: Damn, this is the second time I've failed to update an story when I had a chapter completed! On the bright side, I suppose, you get two chapters today!

**Chapter Twelve**

It took some time for Beka to realize where her instincts were taking her. It was a place she had never been, though she had heard enough about it to have a good feel for where in the slipstream it could be found. Somehow she was hanging on to her sanity through the chemical assault on her brain. Not for much longer, she knew. Her deepest instincts guided her, but even they would gutter out when the Flash high finally faded. She could feel the hallucinations scaling the walls of her mind, reaching their deranged fingers in the tattered mass of her neurons. She just had to dock the supply ship she'd stolen, seal it up so tightly that she wouldn't have to worry about being burgled, and then she'd let herself fall into that drugged fog again.

She barely convinced the hangar authority at Yroman Platform to let her aboard, under a false name. They demanded an advance fee for a full day minimum, which even in her addled state Beka recognized as robbery. She couldn't afford to leave, though, and she passed on too much of her meager personal funds. As soon as she could, she shut herself a musty bunk and powered down the ship. There was hell to come, she knew, but for now her exhaustion overpowered everything else and sent her into a restless, nightmarish slumber. She thrashed in her sleep, her limbs so unused to freedom from that hated chair.

When she awoke, unrelieved darkness met her eyes, so profound that she thought she was still dreaming, trapped in another demonic dimension manufactured by her tortured brain. But the feeling of a bunk – the outline of the support pillars, the thin mattress, the nubby concrete, were so familiar under her searching fingertips that she calmed slightly. After a few minutes, her eyes and adjusted enough to make out a thin reddish light leaking under the hatch. She recognized the emergency generator lights, always on unless specifically switched off.

Inky shadows danced and writhed around her. The Flash was gone, but some of the hallucinations still teased the edges of her skull. She ached for a drink. Her heart still raced, though her sleep had dulled th worst of her panic. She could almost taste the rough burn of the grain alcohol that Clothilde had provided, and she longed for the quiet it brought to her trembling hands and galloping heart. The world would fall back into normal time if she could only have a drink.

Worse than the craving, though, was the hatred she felt for herself. So many times she had vowed to keep herself clean, stay smart, and protect at the very least her pride, her mind, and her pilot's instincts. Eventually she dragged herself to her feet, aching over every inch of her body. When she switched on a light, her eyes burned at the horribly garish colors of reality. She racked her brain to remember what had brought her to Yroman Platform, but the jagged edges of her synapses refused to fire correctly.

She scrounged through the bunk and then the cockpit for a credit chip, found a small one and re-charged it impatiently before venturing outside the ship. By her reckoning, she still had fourteen hours before her docking fee was up, and she was hoping to find someone here who needed a pilot with a ship before then.

But first, some fortification. In a place like this, all roads led to seedy bars, and ten minutes later, she was perched on a rickety stool, tapping her fingers on a grimy bar top as she waited for a double of the cheapest liquor they had. She eyed the cloudy liquid for a few regretful seconds before tossing back a hot mouthful. The bartender eyed her with what might have been admiration as she swallowed without a wince.

"Hey," she rapsed. The bartender, an Umbrite with the longest face Beka had ever seen, ran a filthy towel over th greasy bar top in a poor imitation of cleaning. "Hey, barkeep."

He grunted. "Another already?"

"Don't worry, I'll be here for awhile. No, listen, I need some information."

He shrugged. "What do I know, I just pour drinks. Talk doesn't pay much."

"Yeah yeah. It'll be worth it, okay? I'm staying at this dump for awhile, I guess. I'm not sure why. But anyway, I need a job. I'm a pilot, a good one, and I even got my own ship. I'll run anything anywhere."

The filthy towel appeared again, wiping the tops of glasses. Beka hoped that the alcohol would kill any microbes that without a doubt dwelt on that fabric.

"Like I said, I'm not the classifieds, lady." She tapped her glass, and he filled it again. "But you're in the right place. Usually I warn the ladies away from this place, but on second thought, you don't look like much of a lady." He hacked something that might have been a laugh or a cough.

"You don't look like you'd know a lady if she punched you in the mouth," she retorted, and that hacking noise grew louder.

"I gotcha. If I hear anything, I'll let 'em know you're around. A pilot who's got their own ship is pretty rare around her." He glanced at the level of her glass. "People around here, they don't pay so good in credits, thrones, whatever you like, but they'll... uh, they'll keep you copacetic."

With that, he left to tend one of the other handful of customers. Beka stared morosely into her streaky glass. Copacetic, right. She would bet her drink that the bartender was talking about drug dealers who had cheap access to their product and so could keep employees hooked with very little expense. The saddest thing was, she had hoped he would recommend people like that.

Disgusted noises and a low moan interrupted Beka's reverie. Her fellow clientele buzzed angrily, but it was the suddenly purposeful stride of the bartender that caught her eye. She watched him with half-closed eyes, savoring the fog that had settled over her and turned the world down several degrees, as he crossed in front of the bar to shove the intruder back outside the bar. It was a skinny human, she saw. Her vision blurred for a moment, then resolved again.

Her heart leaped into her throat. The dark hair, those brown eyes, so familiar that she could have drawn them from memory if she'd had the talent. "Rafe," she whispered. She watched in stunned disbelief as the Umbrite grabbed him by his ragged shirt and hauled him out of the bar before giving him a violent push that sent him stumbling to hands and knees.

Something larger than herself drew Beka from her seat. "I'll be back," she called to the bartender. "Remember what I said. Anything, anywhere."

He waved her away, having already set up a tab for her, and return to his desultory cleaning. She tottered as she dismounted the bar stool, unused to the effects of alcohol on her equilibrium; at Clothilde's place, she hadn't moved much at all. Under the smirking gazes of the few other customers, she quickly righted herself and hurried out.

He was not hard to find. The skinny, sickly-looking man was pulling himself to his feet, trembling slightly. He looked as if the slightest shock could send him reeling again, so Beka started talking softly to him before she reached him. "Hey there. Mister, are you okay?"

"'m fine," he mumbled. "no... not right. Not here."

"Let me help you up," she said as she continued taking slow steps toward him. "Easy now."

He tried feebly to bat her arms away, but when he turned his face to her, they both froze. Beka had hoped she was wrong, but a lucid space cleared in her brain, reminding her where she'd learned of Yroman Platform. Tyr, telling her where he'd found a Rafe, a drugged-out wretch after Clothilde's merciless questioning and manipulations.

"Rocket?" he whispered. Tears fill his eyes as he shook like a leaf in her arms. "She was looking... the angel. She wanted you. To hurt. I... Rocket, did I? I don't know."

The angel. Beka gritted her teeth. "She's gone, Rafe. She's gone for good. We're safe now, you and me." The lie rang hollow in her ears, but Rave gave her a tremulous smile. "Come on, come with me. Valentine Smart and Valentine Smarter." The sight of her brother looking like he hadn't eaten or slept in weeks had sobered her up, but it was still a chore dragging him back to the ship. Her muscles were so weak, so unused to exertion that the strain made her nauseous.

She could imagine what a sight the pair of them made. If only the onlookers knew – ravaged by the same chemical cocktail, burdened with the same addictive genetics and rocky childhood. Rafe clung to her and muttered about angels and anger, and it broke Beka's heart to see him like this, far worse than even she was. She hated to imagine how long Clothilde had worked on him. In his bleary eyes, constantly jumping around to peer at objects she could not see, Beka could not find a trace of the big brother she'd always known, full of cynicism and cocksureness, cutting humor and a hidden bitterness.

"Here we are," she announced softly before opening the hatch and led him to the bunk she had taken over. Someone had installed a fancy water collection and filtration system, and now with a flick of a switch, Beka was able to give Rafe a cup of clean water. He choked at first, as if he did not remember how to swallow, but eventually he drained the cup and two refills.

"Hey, are you tired? Do you want to get some sleep?" She was talking to him the way she talked to young children, on the rare occasion she did so, and she hated it.

He wrapped his arms around his chest and shivered. "Not safe. Always move. They kick me."

Beka squeezed his shoulder. "No one will kick you here. You're on, um, my ship. No one besides me can get in."

His gaze zipped manically around the room, settling on things and flitting away a moment later, like a fly trying to find morsels of food. "Your ship." He looked up at her. "Rocket?"

"That's right, it's your baby sister, and I'm taking care of you. Now go to sleep. I have to go, but I'll be back in a little while."

Eyes still wide, he nodded at her and let himself crumple sideways onto the mattress. He had lain atop the blankets, so Beka just ruffled his greasy hair before leaving. She knew he wasn't putting on an act, scamming her to get control of the ship, but she could not help worrying about Rafe alone there. She had almost locked the hatch to her quarters but decided instead to lockdown ship controls until she returned. Divine knew she he might do it he panicked at finding himself trapped in that bunk.

Her bizarre meeting with Rafe had completely shattered the relaxing effects of the alcohol, and already her skin was jumping and hallucinations were creeping into her peripheral vision. She needed something, an upper or a downer, either to kickstart her brain she could think about the mess she'd found herself in, or something that would take the edge off, let her relax a little. Knowing how terrible an idea it was, she had started a tab at the bar, so her credit chip was still full, or as full as she could afford.

Rafe needed food. She could use some too, for that matter, but the bar was so close, just a few minutes away, and she had no idea where a food vendor might be. It made sense, she reasoned, to stop in the bar to ask directions. She would probably find it faster that way. It was even possible that the bartender could recommend someone who needed her services, and then she could take Rafe to whatever passed as a med bay here and get him fixed up. Yes, that was the right course of action. To the bar it was.

**-o-**

Dylan couldn't say what it was that led him to choose the Maru as the vessel to continue his search for Beka. It certainly wasn't logic; if she really was running away from him, she would learn of his prsence the moment she identified the Maru, and likely she would flee again. But there was something comforting and somehow appropriate about using Beka's ship to find Beka, and he knew it was the right decision when Trance, whom Beka called her good luck charm, clapped her hands at learning that Dylan planned to take the Maru. He wasn't so sure that Trance was merely lucky, and whatever she was, he knew by now to trust her opinion.

Hanging from a little hook above the viewscreen in the cockpit, beside a pair of fuzzy dice, was a tiny red toy rocket, complete with orange and yellow flames propelling it on its way. He brushed the rocket and watched it spin gently. Everything on this ship reminded him of Beka, right down to the cockpit controls. The Andromeda's Command was designed to accommodate most sentient species, but the chair here and the straps were adjusted to fit Beka perfectly. He hated to change the tilt and level of it; it felt like he was defiling a sacred space.

As he was preparing for departure, Trance crept into the cockpit and seemed to materialize beside him, a violet streak in the corner of his vision. Andromeda wished them luck as she released the airlock, and then it was just the two of them.

"Did you have a chance to look over Tyr's report?" Dylan asked Trance as he re-acquainted himself with the Maru.

"Yeah, it was kinda depressing." Dylan turned his head to raise an impatient eyebrow at her, and she continued, in a tone of wounded innocence, "But I read it! I also read all the information about _that women_," she said with more venom than he'd ever heard in her voice before. "The problem is, none of it is about Beka right now. It's hard... there's no link to where she is."

Dylan felt his chest tighten as fear gripped him, but he gave Trance a small smile. "Don't worry, Trance. We'll find her, like you said."

The bravado in his voice must have cheered her because she sounded more like herself when she replied. "You're right, Dylan. Love is the most powerful force in the universe." He glanced at her to see a dreamy expression in her eyes, like she was seeing something in the Maru's hull. "All kinds of love, even when we don't know it."

"Trance?"

She blinked and looked back to him. "Dylan, I think I know where we should look for Beka. I have to check Tyr's report again."

The minutes that he waited for her stretched out as Dylan gripped the safety straps of the chair so hard his knuckles turned white. He hated that he didn't have the first idea where to look for her, hated that he couldn't find Beka on his own. Finally, when he was getting ready to unstrap himself and hunt Trance down, she breezed back into the cockpit.

"Yroman Platform," she said breathlessly. "We have to go to Yroman Platform."


End file.
